Learning Chinese – Students

July 17th, 2009 by Miguel

China has a large population, there about one fourth of the world population who speak Chinese. This number is huge compared to the number of English speakers (322,000,000) and native Spanish speakers (332,000,000) [Source: The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey 1999].

The US government admits that China has made considerable efforts to help introduce Chinese at public schools and it is an important player. The government has authorized ,3 billion dollars in federal funding over five years for Chinese language instruction in American schools [Source: news release from Senator Joe Lieberman office: May 26, 2005]. The “Department of State has designated that Chinese is a ‘critical language’ ” [source: Newsweek article, May 2005]

For an MBA student, imagine the potential of accessing a vast sea of abundant, low cost talent. Just to give a glimpse, China produced 700,000 engineers in 2004 while the US produced the 60,000 engineers. Outsourcing is very real, and more companies are outsourcing customer support, manufacturing, IT and other business functions. It not only furthers the business relationship to be able to negotiate and understand without a clumsy translator, but also decreases chances of costly miscommunication.

Because of the recent tilt towards free market economies, rapid growth, and increasing numbers of skilled workers, China requires people that understand the best practices in their new free economy. Many of these new positions will be filled by MBA graduates from well versed in finance, Chinese speaking US and European institutions, management, and marketing.

Learning Chinese can be very difficult, The written system for Chinese is ideographic, or based strongly on symbols and characters, rather than some sort of alphabet. The language itself is one of the top four most time-intensive languages to learn [source: Foreign Service Institute]. The process of speaking and reading Chinese actually uses different parts of your brain.

Learning Chinese There are 10 mistakes that all beginner Chinese students make that slow them down and are very frustrating, Read on to learn how to recognize and avoid the 10 common makes people make.

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