Russia's Putin says his young family members speak fluent Mandarin Chinese

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that young members of his family speak fluent Mandarin, though he told school children they should not forget the importance of English too despite the growing popularity of Chinese.

Putin has two daughters with his ex-wife Lyudmila and they speak Russian, English, German, and French. Putin, who divorced his wife in 2014, rarely speaks about his family but has at least three grandchildren, according to Russian media.

"Some of my family members, the little ones, speak Chinese too - they speak it fluently," Putin told pupils of Secondary School No. 20 in Kyzyl, Tuva, about 4,500 km (2,800 miles) east of Moscow.

Amid a growing partnership between China and Russia, Mandarin has been growing in popularity across Russia as a foreign language of choice, a trend Putin said was due to developing contacts across economics, politics and society.

Putin, who speaks fluent German but has also taken lessons to improve his English, said that pupils should not forget the importance of English.

"English is a great language, it has given humanity a great deal in terms of combining knowledge and uniting people in the field of culture, and so on," Putin said.

Russian, English, Tatar, German and Chechen are the most widely spoken languages in Russia, according to the 2022 census. While Mandarin is spoken far less, it has been growing swiftly in popularity in recent years as a foreign language.

Putin and China's President Xi Jinping in May pledged a "new era" of partnership between the two most powerful rivals of the United States, which they cast as an aggressive Cold War hegemon sowing chaos across the world.

China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War Two.

English is the world's most spoken language with about 1.5 billion speakers, followed by Mandarin Chinese with about 1.1 billion speakers, and then Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Urdu, according to Ethnologue, a language research center.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Gareth Jones)