The Telegraph – Patrick Sawer
“At just two-years-old Barclay can already say “hello”, “bubbles”, “wash hands” and several other words in Mandarin. Ursula, also two, can say “fish”, “horse” and “more food” and her Mandarin vocabulary already stretches to more than 50 words. But this isn’t Beijing or Shanghai, and neither are Barclay’s or Ursula’s parents Chinese. Both children are English and this is a day care centre housed in a Welsh Presbyterian chapel in the City of London. Welcome to Hatching Dragons, Britain’s first bilingual English-Mandarin nursery…“I wanted my own boy to be fluent enough at an early age to be able to sustain that in later years,” said founder Cenn John. “It’s also a way of helping to break down prejudice to different cultures, in this case Chinese, by learning about them through song and language. I want to help children be globally confident and capable in a changing world. We have to become able to communicate with a market of 1.37 billion people.””(more)