Emily Maitlis: We’re learning Chinese for all the wrong reasons

David Cameron has announced that he wants to double the number of Chinese learners in the UK by 2020. As a linguist, I should have read the news with joy (“Wow, Mandarin! Wow, my children! Wow! In our schools!”) Instead, a little bit of me wept with despair.

I realised something I have been trying to suppress for a long time: I really don’t care if my children learn Chinese or not. In fact, I think I would choose for them to learn Latin over Chinese every single time.

As a twentysomething living in Hong Kong, I went to Mandarin classes twice a week. They were called MacMandarin and we built the characters (zhe) up, stroke by stroke on the computer keys.

It was painfully slow. But not nearly as painful as trying to make the spoken word work with bemused strangers.

Aged 26, after a bad split with a boyfriend, I took a few weeks off work and headed to Taiwan to improve my Mandarin. I adored Taiwan — an instant love affair, a vibe and a people so different to the rigidity of mainland China.

I took four hours of class a day and talked to anyone I could. I was fabulously chatty in nightclubs once vodka had softened my self-consciousness. But here’s the thing: if I had invested that much time in a Romance language, or just about anything else, we would have been discussing Nietzsche by then.

As it was, my conversations were pitiful. Once I’d been through the ages of my siblings, pets and directions to the Great Hall, things kind of dried up.

It’s hard, yes, or maybe I was just utterly rubbish. But that’s not the reason I’m saying don’t bother. No, the reason it makes my heart sink is because it feels like we’re learning it for all the wrong reasons.

We don’t teach our kids French because France is going to become the world’s economic powerhouse. We teach them French because we have a shared history, an appreciation of their culture, and because — simply put — they’re our neighbours.

When I see our politicians pushing Mandarin it seems to me so pitifully craven (“Speak Chinese and you too can be the foreman in a Shenzhen factory! You too can bow to the politburo and beg for investment privileges”).