The State of Utah offers 3 language options for DLI:  Spanish, French and Mandarin.  Spanish is currently offered at PPES and French has just been approved for Trailside.  In considering a 3rd program for Park City, the School Board should make Mandarin the language choice for that program.

• There are only a few "slots" of Mandarin language DLI remaining for the state of Utah; Park City should have one of them.
• Park City should offer the variety of language choice to its parents.
• Mandarin is, by a significant factor, the most widely-spoken language in the world. 
  
• Unlike Latin-based languages (Spanish, French, English), Mandarin is a 'tonal' language, which means that being able to create and distinguish tones is essential to fluency.  It is a known that after a certain age, humans lose the ability to even perceive some tonal differences, making it nearly impossible to learn - to fluency - a language such as Mandarin.  Being native English speakers, our children will always have the ability to learn other Latin-based languages.  They have a very narrow window to actually learn tonal languages, such as Mandarin.
  

Sponsor

Links