Immersion is a lot easier than this mom’s plan…

Lynn Berat (second row, center) poses for a picture with her children in front of their Chinese tutor’s house in New Jersey on July 27. Photo: Xinhua

It is not uncommon for non-Chinese to learn Chinese nowadays, as the world’s oldest in-use written language is becoming increasingly popular with the rapid rise of China.

But it is phenomenal that 58-year-old Lynn Berat, who holds two PhDs from Yale University, kind of “forced” her nine daughters to learn Chinese from infancy in a bid to have them well-prepared to be what she called “citizens of the world.”

‘Completely Chinese’

Berat fell in love with Chinese culture when she was giving lectures at Peking University in the early 1980s. She quickly realized that the Chinese language is “pictographic” and “very different” from Indo-European languages.

“It requires a greater effort than a language with an alphabet… Chinese seemed to be something that they [her children] should learn from infancy,” Berat told the Xinhua News Agency in a recent interview.