When US President Donald Trump showed a video of his granddaughter singing and reciting poems in Mandarin to President Xi Jinping during Trump's visit to China, it became a hit on social media and prompted an outpouring of affection from many in China.

What the video of 5-year-old Arabella Kushner didn't show is the growing movement by many US families to have their children study Mandarin at a young age.

"We were so thrilled to see Arabella on social media. It was a surprise for everyone, and it's such a wonderful compliment to their parents," says Patrizia Saraceni Corman, founder and president of Carousel of Languages, a private language school in Manhattan where Ivanka Trump's three children studied Mandarin.

She says the children attended the school several times each week over the past few years.

She says the school has seen an increase in the number of US families having their children learn Mandarin, and now there are more than 100 at the school. "It's a huge investment in their children's future, not only because of China's emerging market, but Mandarin is an attractive language - children love to learn Mandarin because it's such a tonal language, and it is the language with the most native speakers in the world," Corman says.

She says children learning Mandarin at the school are from all over the world, and they are there for various reasons. There are families where one or both parents are from China who want their children to keep their cultural heritage, and there are US families who are attracted by China and its culture.

"Americans have completely changed their outlook about learning foreign languages, and we have seen an enormous shift with our American families having their children start learning foreign languages as young as four months," says Corman.

Besides Ivanka Trump, many wealthy parents are also pushing their young children to learn Mandarin, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, and Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, according to Business Insider.

When people ask Corman how to teach an infant Mandarin, "it's just exactly the way any parents teach their kids," she says, explaining that the school has created its teaching system based on a multisensory approach - verbal, visual and tactile association that allows children to learn on multiple levels.

Zhao Danchen, the head of curriculum design at Carousel of Languages, says: "I've taught infants, toddlers and young children Mandarin at the school. The kids who came here are from 6 months to 12 years old.

"When you teach a baby, she's 9 months, and she doesn't even speak English, all you need to do is to have her or him immersed in the whole language environment. They are listening to you, they look at all the pop-ups, they touch things, they hear you repeating the language, so they pick up right away, just like you learn Chinese in China," says Zhao, who graduated from Teachers College at Columbia University last year.

"The most interesting part about Mandarin is it's such a very different language. It has different characters, different pronunciation and tones, and they love writing, they regard Chinese as pictures. Since kids love drawing, they love writing Chinese characters."

ruinanzhang@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily Africa Weekly 11/24/2017 page15)