By Jonathan Pearlman, For The Straits Times

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA: - After living for two years in Beijing, where his father had a work contract, 12-year-old Kane Weber returned home to Melbourne, Australia, and made an unusual decision: He wanted to learn Chinese.

His parents found a school that offered Chinese. Typically, however, most of his classmates chose to learn Italian.

While Kane found Chinese 'more fun' to learn, his mother, Ms Melinda Smith, had other reasons for supporting his choice. 'If he can master the language, he can master the culture,' she said.

'For travel or work, he will have a level of cultural understanding that he would not get otherwise.'

Yet, in Australian schools, students such as Kane are a rarity.

To the growing dismay of the country's business and political leaders, rates of study of second languages such as Chinese, Indonesian and Korean are among the lowest in the developed world. The slump has continued for decades, despite Australia's increasing trade and cultural ties with its Asian neighbours.

Almost 95 per cent of the 87,000 or so Australian high school students who learn Chinese drop it before their final year. Of the remaining 5 per cent, the majority are from a Mandarin-speaking background. The slump extends to universities, where the number of languages offered dropped from 66 in 1997 to just 29 in 2007.

The finding from a 2007 report, titled Languages In Crisis, by the country's top eight universities, noted that nearly 40 per cent of students completed a language for their final-year exams in the 1970s. But after language study was dropped as a prerequisite for university entrance, the figure fell to 13 per cent.

The decline in Asian language skills has alarmed the leaders of some of Australia's biggest companies, which have formed a group, the Business Alliance for Asia Literacy, to promote the study of Asian languages and culture. Members include the Commonwealth Bank, IBM Australia, Singapore Airlines, Qantas and 11 international business councils, including the Australia-Singapore Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The alliance was launched this month by the head of the Australian Industry Group, Ms Heather Ridout, who said the global financial crisis had made it even more pressing for schools and education departments to promote Asian studies.

'Understanding Asia, knowing the languages, cultures and traditions, and teaching our children about our near neighbours, is clearly essential for our future prosperity,' she added.

'Once we come out of this economic downturn, Australia will be looking to Asia as a core driver of our own recovery. Now is the time to be preparing.'

Ms Kathy Kirby, executive director of the Asia Education Foundation, a government-funded organisation that promotes Asian studies, said one of the main reasons for the low demand for Chinese is that it takes an English speaker almost four times as long to learn it, compared to the time taken to learn a European language.

The United States Foreign Service Institute has estimated that an English speaker needs about 2,200 hours to develop proficiency in Chinese, compared with 600 hours for French.

The business alliance has called for incentives and scholarships to encourage students to take up Asian studies, and funding to assist the training and recruitment of teachers. One model for potential success is the relatively high take-up of Japanese.

Ms Kirby said this was partly due to the Japanese government's support by helping young Japanese come to Australia for a gap year as teachers.

'Modern Japanese is also a much more simplified, character-based language than Chinese,' she said. 'Across the world, we are only just starting to grapple with how to teach Chinese.'

Efforts to promote Asian language literacy have been bolstered by the election in 2007 of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is fluent in Chinese. During a visit to Singapore last year, he said he wanted to make Australia 'the most Asia-literate country in the collective West'.

Since then, the government has launched a A$62 million (S$68.4 million) plan to double the number of final-year students fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean within a decade. The funds will be used to train teachers, improve classroom and online learning materials, and provide grants to schools and Asian community groups that develop initiatives to promote literacy.

Back in Melbourne, Kane said his class has learnt almost 50 characters in its first six months. He has no plans to drop his studies. 'It is a totally different language,' he said. 'There is no alphabet. I just like learning the strokes of the characters and how to speak it.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.