First the good news. State schools in the UK are starting to offer a much broader range of foreign languages than the traditional French or German. Since 2005 the number of schools offering Mandarin as an option has increased from 2% to 14%, while Italian has increased from 7% to 18%. The availability of Urdu, Russian and Arabic has also increased.

With China’s growing influence in the world, making Mandarin available as a foreign language option can only be a good thing. And learning it from an early age is no bad thing either, as some people find it difficult to adapt to the Mandarin pronunciation later in life.

Many also find it difficult to get to grips with the writing system which uses individual characters for particular words or concepts. The examples featured in the Chinese GCSE specification (PDF) I looked at were written in Simplified Chinese, as one would expect for people learning Mandarin with an eye to interacting with mainland China (or more correctly the People’s Republic of China).

This at least reduces the number of characters that need to be learned, although there are still thousands!

And it is interesting to note that many Traditional Chinese characters seem to be gaining currency even in the PRC as the influence of Hong Kong is felt.

There is a down side exposed in the CiLT report though. Although the decline in foreign languages in our schools has bottomed out, this summer saw just 44% of Key Stage 4 (ie 16 year old) pupils sit a language GCSE. Compare this to France where the teaching of English is compulsory up to age 17.

Although many schools are taking up alternative qualifications to GCSE to tempt pupils to learn languages, we still lag some way behind many other EU countries.

My daughter is currently going through the process of chososing her GCSE subject and to try to ensure she takes at least one foreign language I will be directing her here – 700 reasons why it is good to learn another language.