Mandarin

I believe the best language for American's to have as a second language is soon going to be Mandarin Chinese. Many schools are now starting to teach it, here is a Washington Post article about one such school district in Portland, Oregon. I've seen the arguments on APC - do you send your child to Chinese school or do you let them be "normal". I have a problem with the premise of the question, because the question makes it sound like a child who goes to Chinese school is not normal. I don't know what interests my child will have, I will try to provide classes or lessons for whatever she wants to do. But she will also go to Chinese school, and we plan to eventually have one day a week that our family will only speak Chinese, no English allowed. We can all speak a little bitty bit of it right now - we all have a vocabulary of several hundred words, but you can't really go through a whole day on just that many words. Not yet, anyway. It would be nice if the school my daughter attends includes Chinese classes. We haven't completely narrowed the field down yet, but none of the ones on our A list offer it. Maybe that will change before too much longer.