World Learner Chinese Newsletter – February 2009
This is just a quick note. I hope this year is bringing you the best of health and happiness.
I welcome everyone to the public web site. It’s still a bit simple. However, over the next few months, we hope to add more useful Chinese language learning tools as well as develop a fruitful online Chinese language learning community.
Over the past few months, we have been restructuring our courses and taking part in international conferences focusing on Chinese learning. We gathered a lot of information from both mainland China and Taiwan"Taiwan" is also commonly used to refer to the area under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China (ROC) government, not to be confused with the People's Republic of China government. Following World War II, the ROC gained control of Taiwan from the Japanese in 1945, but lost control of mainland China to the Chinese Communist Party four years later in 1949 as a result of the Chinese Civil War. The Kuomintang (KMT) government then retreated to the island and moved the capital to Taipei. While the People's Republic of China (PRC) claims Taiwan as its province, the PRC has never controlled Taiwan. The main island of Taiwan, also known as Formosa (from Portuguese (Ilha) Formosa, meaning "beautiful (island)"), is located in East Asia off the coast of China, southwest of the main islands of Japan but directly west of the end of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, and north-northwest of the Philippines. It is bound to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea and the Luzon Strait, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea. The island is 394 kilometers (245 miles) long and 144 kilometers (89 miles) wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation. Though for decades following the Chinese Civil War, the ROC was politically a single-party authoritarian state, the ROC has since evolved into a democracy in Asia. Its rapid economic growth in the decades after World War II and the government's relocation to Taiwan has brought it to an advanced economy status as one of the Four Asian Tigers. This economic rise is known as the Taiwan Miracle. It is categorized as an advanced economy by the IMF and high-income economy by the world bank. Its technology industry plays a key role in the global economy. Taiwanese companies manufacture a giant portion of the world's consumer electronics. about the teaching and testing of Chinese which will be reflected in our online course materials.
For those of you who haven’t gotten the chance to look around the site, here are a few things to look for while visiting WLC.
1. Simple discussion forums where anyone can ask questions about not only the Mandarin
Chinese language but things like Chinese culture, media and more.
2. Links to streaming Chinese radio and television stations.
3. Live Chat Room (A forum section for the announcements of online chat session times has been
created).
Currently we are working on a better flash card section for SubscriptionA membership model where free or paid access is given for a product or service. Users.
A full RSS link to our public audiocasts will be updated soon.
I setup a small photo gallery of the WLC team on Picasa (WLC Photo Gallery)
I hope that you will take the time to visit the site and share your thoughts.
再見 for now.
James
World Learner Chinese Host
In our next newsletter, I will discuss a few points concerning the direction one may choose to take to learn Chinese.
