English beginning to be spoken here

摘要

"My mother used to be an engineer, but now she's a housewife. I don't like her job. I want to be a designer. I like to think up new ideas." Not the words of a young British or American child, but a nine-year-old Chinese girl in Shenzhen city, southern China. And Shun Yushun is no prodigy. She is typical of her English First school, one of 68 on the mainland started by a Swedish-owned language-teaching chain. Yushun belongs to a new generation in a country where older folks, deprived of education during the Cultural Revolution, speak almost no English at all. Even young adults struggle, having passed through an archaic school system that still insists on the brute memorisation of words and grammar. Zhang Jin, a 24-year-old from remote Guizhou province, studied English from the age of 12 and then for four years at Huanan University. But she has trouble putting a sentence together.