Fudan student wins the CCTV Cup English Speaking Contest

brian2: some of the public and private schools here have begun teaching Mandarin even in early grades, including kindergarten. http://stories.globalatlanta.com/2008stories/016090.html

http://www.emorywheel.com/detail.php?n=25265

http://imaginewesley.org/core/item/page.aspx?s=76017.0.0.967

eh, a lot of them sound much better than native English speakers.

They're, at the very least, much better than the CCTV9 reporters and anchors.

After 10 to 15 years of very intense English language study required for all university students, the contestant's skill is not all that impressive.

American students who begin Chinese language classes in college begin too late to learn the language.

In the future, the US must begin language instructions in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Urdu, etc. while students are in middle school.

"a more bigger variety of communicating" eh? that is some pretty basic grammar he fucked up there. not to say that my Chinese isn't full of grammatical errors but these speaking contests are, pardon my un-p.c.-ness, retarded. Over emphatic hand gestures do not a good English speaker make.

That being said, it would be awesome if there were Chinese speaking contests in western countries, at least that would show that people were trying to learn Chinese. But I am sure the winners would also be huge gommers.

Have these contestants studied overseas? If they got that good just from studying in the mainland, that's pretty impressive.