A superb app for any one looking at learning basic Mandarin Chinese. Play the game to listen and see the language. There are many different types of questions, but most are multiple choice or click and drag from a selection of choices. Questions start out easy and there is support and 'hint' buttons to help you. You can download each lesson as you reach it, or download everything if you plan to use it offline. All the language you have met is stored in a word bank and use your microphone to compare your pronunciation to the recordings.
Hispanics made up 16 percent of America’s population in 2009, but that is forecast to surge to 29 percent by 2050
Spanish is easy enough that kids really can emerge from high school with a very useful command of the language that they will retain for life, while Mandarin takes about four times as long to make the same progress.
In effect, Chinese is typically a career. Spanish is a practical add-on to your daily life, meshing with whatever career you choose.
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The thing that worries most non-specialists teaching language is pronouncing words correctly from a book. This is where Forvo is is priceless. Native speaker users and the site itself have uploaded audio clips of word for us non native speakers to copy. The site has 250+ languages uploaded. I tested the Mandarin section, as I understand that, and it was faultless. An amazing resource.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Languages%2C+Culture+%26+International+Projects
The rationale or thinking behind introducing languages early in primary school
Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
education will be the key and wants all school students to study an Asian language.
The gold standard =any excellent example of something, like how Olympians are the gold standard for athletes
If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
The Hawke-Keating Government refers to the Federal Government of Australia from 11 March 1983 to 11 March 1996. It was a Labour government
Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
How do we encourage students to continue learning an Asian language into the final years of high school and eyond?
say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
JEANNIE REA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION
Suggested reasons for the decline in language graduates and therefore in language teachers.
will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
e Prime Minister acknowledges the shortages, but says technology
This argument t can be debated. It would suggest that technology in itself will be a solution!
we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
Completely deluded. Even here in Singapore, surrounded supposedly by chinese speakers the international schools are not getting it right and success stories are unusual ...
"This is a fab HTML5 language learning site which tests your language skills through a series of games with 1500 words. The site collects stats on your performance. The current 21 languages include English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japan, Italian, Russian, Polish and many more."