"Americans have never been particularly interested in learning other languages and are even less interested today. . . . Our government spends 25 per cent less, adjusted for inflation, than it did 40 years ago on foreign-language training at university level."

So wrote author Susan Jacoby in the New York Times on Feb. 7 as part of a series of short articles under the comprehensive headline, "Will Americans Really Learn Chinese?"

In fact, there has been a small rise in the number of schools teaching Chinese in the United States, largely thanks to subsidies from the Chinese government.