Lamar Offers New Mandarin Chinese Course

A staple of most high school curriculums is the requirement that students take at least two language credits. 

Lamar offers a wide variety of language classes for students to take, but most will only take Spanish. There are various reasons for this, but the most obvious is how practical the language is in our school, state and country. Conversational Spanish tends to be easier to acquire than various other languages offered. 

There are a lot of students on campus who really enjoy a challenge. While Spanish may be useful, the option to choose a less popular language class is very exciting. 

This school year, Lamar hired a new language teacher and she’s teaching a language that is sure to be an exciting challenge for many students. Li Han has come to Lamar to teach students how to speak, write and understand how to use Mandarin Chinese in a coherent way.

According to the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council – there are more than 360 high schools in Texas that offer Mandarin Chinese classes. The course is growing in popularity and students are intrigued by the opportunity to learn such an important language. 

Han’s new classroom is of course located in the foreign language hall, however one important thing passersby will notice about her displayed course schedule is the fact that she only teaches one class per day.

“She’s actually been working at Shackelford Junior High for half the day and then she comes to Lamar to teach classes during 4th (A-Day) and 10th period (B-Day),” Spanish teacher Dean Wou explains. 

Because the course is new, the recruitment process is still taking shape. There are not yet enough students enrolled in Mandarin Chinese to warrant a full schedule of six classes. 

AISD hopes that by introducing junior high students to the language, that many will continue with the program when they enroll in high school. And of course, Mandarin Chinese will continue to be an option for other students who are curious about learning the language.

While the opportunity to learn Mandarin Chinese yields many benefits, the course is definitely a challenge. 

“It’s not an easy language to learn,” Wou says. “It uses four tones for speaking and not everyone is good at tones.”

Mandarin Chinese is a very unique, but difficult language to learn, as it’s a very tonal language rather than phonetic. It uses a logographic writing system called the Hanzi alphabet which uses characters that represent words and meanings. There are also over 50,000 characters in the Hanzi alphabet which will encourage the average learner’s brain to be better at memorization and attention to detail.

Any foreign language a student studies will look good on a job or college application, however, Mandarin Chinese may just offer the kind of edge certain students are seeking.

“If you take Mandarin in high school, it would look good on college applications and Mandarin actually has an AP test,” Wou adds.

Mandarin Chinese requires significant time and effort to master character recognition and pronunciation which may frustrate some students, but the long term benefits make it worth the challenge.

Not all high schools offer a comprehensive Mandarin Chinese course, which is why students should definitely take advantage of the fact that Lamar does.