Low Demand for Chinese

I also enjoyed Ken's punchline conclusion:

At the risk of sounding self-serving, they’d be better off for now using ChinesePod.

hehe, na dangran ;)

Ken Carrol covered this about New Zealand? That's awesome. What he says seems to be quite correct, I think here it's just that if it is being taught, it's not being taught in a way that's appealing.

From my experience, the first time I was taught Chinese was from a kid's book which taught me everything I didn't want to know when I was first starting to learn Chinese like "tree", "horse", "moon" etc. My girlfriend's little sister seems to be learning Chinese this way. Though it might be a good way to learn writing, it does not really allow the kids to experiment and have fun with the language.

Even in university I find it not as stimulating as it could be. When I studied Spanish at high school there were a lot more activities and games and the whole learning process was a lot more enjoyable as a whole.

I was quite surprised by that too to be honest. I think the reason is that Waikato is a province that has a lot of emphasis on Maori culture compared to other parts of New Zealand. I am not too sure what the graph includes either, because Maori is compulsory in primary school (I remember when I was growing up learning the very basics) so maybe the makes up for a large number of that graph.

I think most people learning Maori are people of Maori descent or have some sort of Maori background. Around Waikato University I am sometimes caught off guard when I hear people talking in Maori. For me, it is still quite rare to hear people talking it but I think amongst communities I'm sure it's common. There is also a Maori channel and there is Maori news on TV before the primetime news, so Maori language has definetely developed more status compared to how it used to be like when Maori people were punished for speaking it.