40 Million Foreigners Now Learning Chinese

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

12/15/2010

40 Million Foreigners Now Learning Chinese

There are now more than 40 million foreigners learning Chinese around the world. (Photo/ CFP)

Learning Chinese is hot nowadays. A senior official with the Confucius Institute Headquarters said on Saturday (Dec. 11) at the organization's fifth annual conference in Beijing that there are more than 40 million foreigners around the world learning Chinese.

The institute expected to dispatch 2,000 teachers and 3,000 volunteers from China, train 10,000 Chinese teachers and 10,000 local teachers, and release revised Standards for Teachers of Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL) next year.

40 new Confucius Institutes and 97 Confucius Classrooms opened worldwide this year, while eight countries also joined the program, Xu Lin, the headquarters' chief executive and director-general of the Office of Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, said to the reporters.

Read more at WANT China Times

Dec 15, 2010 9:05:23 AM | Current Affairs, Language

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