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Mandarin as a national strategy August 7, 2009 | CFLP

by Chris Kenrick Palo Alto Weekly Staff Summer Mandarin students at Palo Alto High School don't consider themselves players in U.S. national strategy. Their concerns are far simpler -- learning to speak Chinese, working toward an AP test, getting ahead in the business world or just having fun. But the 34 teens, who Friday completed four weeks of Mandarin immersion, are part of a broad federal effort to train Americans in "critical need" foreign languages. Their program, a collaboration of Stanford University and the Palo Alto school district, is funded by the U.S. National Security Agency as part of the National Security Language Initiative launched by President George W. Bush in 2006. "It's to remediate the woeful language performance of Americans," said Duarte Silva, executive director of the Stanford-based California Foreign Language Project, who directed the five-hour-a-day immersion program. "Sept. 11 brought it to the forefront, when we did not have enough Arabic speakers to decipher what was being said about Americans in the chaos that followed." The Palo Alto-Stanford collaboration is one of 125 programs in 31 states this summer funded by the three-year-old STARTALK (Start Talking!) program. The "critical need" languages include Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and -- for the first time this year -- Swahili. Twenty-three of this year's STARTALK programs are in California, including a number of Arabic, Hindi and Persian programs in Los Angeles and San Diego. Palo Alto students displayed their Mandarin prowess Wednesday at a recognition banquet that included a tai chi demonstration and a "welcome dance" performed by master teacher Norman Masuda, who taught Chinese and Japanese in Palo Alto for 39 years before retiring last month. Speaking only Mandarin, students acted out a trip to China, including a visit to Chinese summer festivals, a bout with food poisoning caused by sticky dumplings and a visit to a Chinese doctor. Other skits included a "day in the life" of student John Dickerson, a visit to a ghost festival and descriptions of a favorite T-shirt. More than half the STARTALK students this summer are not "heritage speakers" of Mandarin, according to Silva. Most were from Paly and Gunn High, he said, but the program also was open to other students who demonstrate competence in first-year Mandarin. Dickerson, a Paly sophomore, said he began studying Mandarin last year because "it's useful and widely spoken across the world. "The Chinese economy is growing. There are so many people and so many businesses and the China thing is big," he said. Tess Miller of Menlo Park said she began Mandarin study with a private tutor in fourth grade so she would be able to understand her newly adopted 4-year-old sister. "I had to learn Chinese to communicate with her -- just to see if she was OK or if she was hungry," said Miller, a sophomore at St. Francis High School in Mountain View. Her sister, now 10, speaks fluent English and, having forgotten Mandarin, is re-learning it with a tutor. Miller's dream is to become an ESL teacher and open an orphanage in China. "I want to teach them English as a second language because 65 percent of the kids in an orphanage will go to an English-speaking home," she said. She said she is making her third trip to China this summer to help with children in a foster home. Paly freshman Alexander Ku said Mandarin was his first spoken language, but he needs to work on writing. "I rush when I write, and I get words weird," he said. Gunn sophomore Takuto Sasajima, a native Japanese speaker, said he was drawn to Mandarin because "the absolute number of people speaking Chinese is larger than English." Sasajima also is interested in the similarities between Chinese and Japanese characters. Nick Kavanaugh of Morgan Hill already speaks Spanish because his mother is from Ecuador. He took first-year Mandarin at San Jose's Archbishop Mitty High School last year. This fall, however, Kavanaugh will pursue Mandarin only on weekends. His new school, Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill, does not offer the language. Mitty sophomore Steven Leong, who learned Cantonese from his parents, is finding Mandarin a challenge. "The characters are the same but the dialect is different. A lot of people say you can switch over easily, but I'm having kind of a tough time," Leong said. Ben Krausz of Portola Valley, a student at Woodside Priory, began Mandarin with a private tutor. The priory will begin offering Mandarin next year, he said. Paly sophomore Parker Skiba started Mandarin at a boarding school in Massachusetts last year, having already studied French, Spanish, German and Latin. "Chinese seemed interesting -- more interesting than the others," Skiba said. "If 1.3 billion people learned it, it can't be that hard of a language."