Chinese As A Foreign Language - Where To Learn

Where To Learn

See also: List of Chinese language schools in Taiwan and Language education

Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education. Still, in most of the Western universities, the study of the Chinese language is only a part of Chinese Studies or sinology, instead of an independent discipline. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language is known as (simplified Chinese: 对外汉语教学; traditional Chinese: 對外漢語教學; pinyin: Duìwài Hànyǔ Jiàoxué). The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), is responsible for promoting the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world. Hanban runs a Confucius Institute Online(http://www.chinese.cn) offering over 10,000 Chinese language learning resources.

The People's Republic of China began to accept foreign students from the communist countries (in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa) from the 1950s onwards. Foreign students were forced to leave the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. Taiwan has long been a place for students to study Mandarin. Today's popular choices for the Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include the Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing and the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) and International Chinese Language Program (ICLP, formerly the Stanford Center) in Taiwan. The latter was especially popular before the 1980s when mainland China had yet to open to the other parts of the world.

Many online courses in Standard Chinese, Cantonese and some other dialects are available through commercial, governmental and nonprofit web sites catering to speakers of English and over a hundred other languages. Free and Paid-for courses are also offered via podcasts. Software is also available to help students pronounce, read and translate Chinese into English and other languages.