Milwaukee, Wis., a beautiful city that has a reputation for is breweries, German heritage and Laverne & Shirley, is seeing a surge in interest in Mandarin Chinese language classes, according to a story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In Milwaukee, the School of Languages added Chinese as a partial immersion program this school year. The Marshall Montessori International Baccalaureate High School is starting to build a Mandarin program. When the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Languages opens in the fall, students as young as 4 will have at least a half-hour of Chinese-language instruction daily.

The story calls Mandarin "a new skill for the 21st century," and notes that 30,000 to 50,000 U.S. students currently are enrolled in Mandarin classes, up from just 5,000 in 2000.

In China, however, an estimated 200 million students are learning English.