Students thrive on Mandarin learning at Chicago's top high school

Upper schoolers at the Walter Payton College Preparatory High School like to warm up their get-togethers with a rendition of Jasmine, the classic Chinese folk song that US President Donald Trump's granddaughter performed months ago during her visit to the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

"Chinese is one of the most widely used language in the world. So I think learning it is super important, because so many different people speak it," Helen, a Payton enrollee, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Xu Qun, who came from China for her Mandarin-teaching job at Payton, has noticed for a long time the trendy choice among American children, saying that "I think a lot of children in the US are very young when they start learning Chinese. Some parents think Chinese is so important that they hire a Chinese-speaking nanny to look after their children."