Children play games with Chinese-speaking staff and look at the shadow puppet patterns at the Hatching Dragon nursery.(Photo/Guangzhou Daily)

Children play games with Chinese-speaking staff and look at the shadow puppet patterns at the Hatching Dragon nursery.(Guangzhou Daily)

London saw the opening of Britain's first bilingual English-Chinese nursery called "Hatching Dragon", which teaches children Chinese words and nursery rhymes. Ursula, a two-year-old child, can say “fish”, “horse” in Chinese and her Chinese vocabulary is well over 50 words.

The nursery provides lunches including spring rolls and fried rice, allowing children to know China's food culture.

Numeracy games are played with Chinese characters as well as Arabic numerals. Cenn John, founder of Hatching Dragon, refers to this teaching method as "immersive learning", which encourages children to learn Chinese language and culture from as young as six months.

Each child at this day care center has an English teacher and a Chinese teacher. The English-speaking staff at the nursery plays, sings and talks with the children in English and the Chinese staff does so in Mandarin. This teaching method earns nods from English-speaking parents.

John studied Chinese in university and after graduation, he went to China and worked as an education consultant there.

"I want to help children be globally confident and capable in a changing world. We have to become able to communicate with a market of 1.37 billion people," said John.

This day care center targets the English-speaking parents who want their children to learn Chinese. For now, most of the 36 children at the care center are from English-speaking families. These parents hold that as China is expected to become the largest economy in the future, their children will be more competitive if they have a good command of Chinese.

The high cost of learning Chinese in Britain does not discourage these parents from letting children learn Chinese. Hatching Dragons offers a language-learning program that lasts 10 hours per week, which costs the parents £350 a month. This program is affordable to most middle class families in Britain, compared with the cost of as much as £25 an hour charged by Chinese -speaking tutors. Moreover, the nursery also provides an "affordability scheme" which is subsidized by the Corporation of London.

However, some British parents doubt whether children at such young ages can distinguish between these two languages.