Australia: Asian Languages Losing their Allure

[Francis Hult]

The Australian

 

Asian Languages Losing their Allure

 

Spare a thought for Kevin Rudd. An Asianist among Asianists, he recently had to launch reports showing how weak Asia literacy is in our schools. 

 

But Rudd is a politician, too, and he projected confidence when he addressed the Asialink Asia Society forum in Canberra last month: "My vision is for Australia to be the most Asia-literate nation in the collective West," he said.

 

Yet what he saw in reports on the state of Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean was "an alarming 22 per cent drop between 2000 and 2008 in the number of Australian students studying one of these four Asian languages from kindergarten to Year 12". This was "far worse than feared", according to the Asia Education Foundation, midwife to the reports.

 

Full story:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/asian-languages-losing-their-allure/story-e6frgcjx-1225877157372

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