A dismal government survey released last year showed that foreign language curriculum is on the decline. However, while schools are saying adios and au revoir to the traditional French and Spanish classes they previously offered, they are welcoming Chinese language programs with open arms. Among America’s approximately 27,500 middle and high schools offering at least one foreign language, the proportion offering Mandarin has risen to 4 percent, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics.

The economic power of China makes taking Mandarin seem like a smart career move, especially for those students interested in business. Since Nixon, the Chinese economy has expanded with surprising velocity. With some estimates placing the number of native speakers at 1.1 billion, it is certainly the world’s largest language in absolute terms. The American educational system, eager to keep up, sees teaching Mandarin as that necessary tool for students to seal a stellar deal in the future. From 1997 to 2007, the number of children studying Mandarin at the primary or secondary level grew tenfold, and it has surely increased even more since then. The number of students taking the Advanced Placement test in Chinese, introduced in 2007, has grown so fast that it is likely to pass German this year as the third most-tested A.P. language, after Spanish and French according to Trevor Packer, a vice president at the College Board.

Unfortunately, despite all the signs pointing to economic prosperity guaranteed by attained fluency of the Far East, the benefits of Mandarin are short sighted and often exaggerated. Despite your parents and teachers urgings to study it, Mandarin will not be the language of the future. It is notoriously hard to learn as a second language, and many may only have a rudimentary grasp over it even after years of arduous learning. Mandarin, unlike English, is also a tonal language meaning that some words look exactly the same but are said with different stresses proving to be baffling for students. The writing system for Mandarin is arcane, and it consists of thousands of symbols rather than a simple alphabet. The benefits are there, but in a world where time is money, learning Mandarin is just too costly.

Today, English is currently the global lingua franca. From an economic standpoint, it is far more beneficial to have a native-Mandarin speaker learn English rather than the other way around. Essentially, the end result is the same as long as both parties are able to communicat