The Economist reports:

“CHINA will be the dominant power in the 21st century and the employment opportunities that speaking Mandarin will give are immense.” Thus Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, at a conference in 2006 entitled “Why every school should offer Mandarin”. Nearly two years later, the spectacular growth of the language in British schools shows no sign of slowing. More than 400 secondary schools now teach it, according to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which is lobbying to bring Mandarin into the national curriculum. And Britain is not alone in its enthusiasm for the language: some 30m foreigners are studying Mandarin today, and Chinese authorities expect the number to rise to 100m by 2010.

In a few decades China may indeed overtake America as the world's top economic power. Will Britons who make the effort to learn its language be rewarded with better careers? Barring some kind of sea change in global language learning, the answer will almost always be no.

With its tones and horribly complicated writing system, Mandarin is much harder to learn than most European languages. The Foreign Office, for example, gives its officers four times as long to get from beginner to operational level in Mandarin as it does in Italian, French or Spanish—and only those with the greatest aptitude for languages are selected for it. The vast majority of Westerners who travel to China to study Mandarin give up, go home and forget what they have learned. Undergraduates at British universities find it hard to adjust to a workload heavier than that for other subjects, and many drop out.

To read more:

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10180807