A listener to our audiocast just sent me an email asking this question. Believe me this is not the first time I’ve received mail like this and it surely won’t be the last.
Many people teaching Chinese
will pimp off the line that China has a recorded history covering over 6,000 years and Chinese is spoken by nearly 1.3 billion people, also, China is becoming a leading player in the world’s economy. Well, to me the last statement sounds more like a treating reason to learn Chinese. Never the less, the fact is that the world is becoming smaller and foreign language training is a highly requested skill. Tools like the Internet have increased the amount of interaction between nations and their peoples. Learning about other cultures has become more of a required asset in today’s ever-so interactive and changing world.
I must admit that there are many reasons for learning Chinese. After all Chinese is not only spoken in mainland China and in Taiwan, but in Singapore and parts of Malaysia as well. In fact, one can find that Chinese, of one form of the other, is spoken throughout Southeast Asia and in Chinese communities in Europe and North America.
My personal reasons for learning Chinese started with my early interest in Modern Chinese history and traditional Chinese Martial Arts. I don’t feel my reasons are unique in anyway. So to further my understanding I decided to acquire a better understanding of the Chinese language as well as culture. Another factor may have been that I went to a US university that then required that every student have at least two years of foreign language training. As a result of my interest, I ended up as a student in one of Beijing’s leading teacher’s universities studying not only the Mandarin Chinese language but Chinese history as well. Upon my return to the US I was granted a scholarship by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan to continue my studies in Taipei. As of today, I have over ten years of formal Mandarin Chinese training.
Well, it has been a long and fun road as well. This site was developed to help those who want to learn more about the Chinese language. While developing this site I’ve found myself fortunate to be able to work with some of the best Mandarin Chinese "voices" in both Taipei and Beijing. I’m so happy to be working with so many native Chinese speakers who also have the same passion to share in the teaching of Mandarin Chinese.
Our training method allows the learner to observe how the Chinese language is used in daily real-life situations. Our course structure allows previous taught materials to be constantly reviewed and reinforced for immediate and correct use.
If you have any questions or personal experience concerning learning Chinese, please leave a comment. We would be happy to hear from you.
7 Comments on Why did you learn Chinese anyway? »
November 21, 2007
賈帆 @ 4:35 am:
I’m a Chinese in Japan. My English name is Japhy.
Your blog is great, and I’m so happy that you like Chinese so much. Many Japanese ask me to teach them Chinese, and we are having fun from learning Chinese.
Hope you improve it better and better.
WLC Admin @ 4:53 am:
Thanks a lot Japhy! Nice to have you here with us. We have many Japanese listeners and we hope to be able to offer more to the Japanese community soon. Do you teach Chinese yourself?
jthomas @ 4:58 am:
Nice to see you here Japhy. My name is James and I’m the co-host of the Basic and Intermediate audiocast course section. I hope you continue to find our audiocast useful. If you have any suggestions for our show please let us know. You can leave a message using Skpye. If we can’t talk to you directly you can leave a voice message for us. I travel to Tokyo very often. Maybe we can meet in Tokyo one day.
James
November 27, 2007
Shaun Bliss @ 7:44 pm:
Hi, I’m a UK/US resident living in Beijing for the past 8 years who studied Chinese for 3 years at a Beijing university. This site is a fantastic resource. The audios are clear, useful and explainatory. Love the close attention paid to TONES in the basic audios. At university in China most of the teachers can’t grasp how important TONES are for us western folk to learn the language. They assume we’re not saying the word correctly because we can’t pronounce the TONE. When in fact, its usually that we can’t remember which TONE to use on a particular word. Keep up the good work. I hope you guys are very successful and generate enough income to keep going forever. As I’m well aware, there’s more than enough stuff to learn.
For me personally.. the main thing I struggle with is TV news. So.. dialogues in that style with explainations would be great at the upper
intermediate and advanced levels. Same with day to day office life dialogues.
Oh yeah.. the girl’s voice is very cute.. I must visit Taiwan.
Zhen De !
Shaun Bliss
November 28, 2007
jthomas @ 6:09 am:
Glad to have you here Shaun. I can understand what you mean. I’m from New York City and a graduate of, the then, Beijing Teacher’s College (now called Beijing Teacher’s University) and our regular course teachers didn’t bug us at all about tones. However, we had super hard working language teachers that watched over us like language police. At WLC we try to teach correct tones the first time around along with any major tonal modifications. There are some regional tonal issues we have to deal with from both sides and different parts of the straits. We have a team member in Beijing who also reminds us of these differences. Also as a broadcaster I feel very lucky to be able to work with local broadcasters that make it their duty to only use standard broadcast Mandarin Chinese. Currently we also offer higher level Mandarin Chinese training online for IT companies in mainland China and Taiwan via the Learning Center section or our site. We hope to make these courses open to the public in a few months. Other future audiocasts will have topics that will follow more day to day life dialogues (ie. situational). Note that if you follow our audiocasts from the beginning, you would notice that they are all connected in someway. BTW, I just told Remy what you said about her voice. She laughed until she had tears in her eyes. Once again, nice to see you here and I hope to chat with you again.
James, WLC Host
December 11, 2007
Susan LaVenture-Austin @ 1:35 pm:
Ni hao James!!! I learned Chinese because my housemate at college (Chen Hong) was the teacher. I also love to learn languages and have been a French teacher since 1986. I have also studied German, Spanish, Italian Mohawk Indian.
I also have many internationally located friends since I was the president of the International Student Union at my college too.
So have you studied any other languages??
Does this post ring any bells???
jthomas @ 2:04 pm:
Now this is strange. I think we may know eachother. That’s over 20 years ago. When Deng Xiao Ping was pointing China to the Open Door. Now to top it off, you were my first Chinese teacher’s roommate. This is a small world. So tell me more. How do you use your Chinese today? Do you every get back to China or Taiwan? Oh, and yes! I can currently communicat well in two local southern dialects as well…. This is a long way from the Bronx!
James
WLC - Host