A Cradle of Mandarin Language Learning

Chang Yu-hsin, deputy executive director of the Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan (FICHET), notes that some 1.118 billion people in the world use Mandarin Chinese (Huayu), of whom 920 million are native speakers. This implies that more than 190 million people worldwide have a need for Huayu education.

But doesn’t it take a really long time to learn Mandarin? And isn’t it only possible if one attends a Huayu school?

Chang Yu-hsin, deputy executive director of the Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan, believes that compared to other countries, Taiwan offers better teachers and instructional materials for learning Huayu, which is among the reasons why many prestigious foreign schools have chosen to work with Taiwan.

An easy start to learning Mandarin

Open the Huayu 101 app and click on “How much does this cost,” and you can hear the phrase “Qǐngwèn zhège duōshǎo qián?” said in either a male or a female voice. The Huayu 101 webpage (lmit.edu.tw/lc/huayu101), which fits the needs of people with no foundation at all in Mandarin, has already had 300,000 user visits, with the top three user countries being Japan, Korea, and the US. The app currently has 17,000 users.

“These online resources show that learning Chinese is not as difficult as most people think, and is not some unattainable goal,” says Chang Yu-hsin, who was in charge of compiling the Huayu 101 teaching materials. Users include foreign tourists visiting Taiwan as well as people from Southeast-Asian countries, with Myanmar topping that list. Chang opines that this is because it is easier for people in Myanmar to find work if they have Chinese language skills. Meanwhile, in Thailand, people who can speak Mandarin can earn an additional 2,000 to 3,000 baht per month (about US$60–85).

“Mandarin in 300 Sentences,” an online course for beginners and near beginners, teaches Chinese that can be applied immediately to daily life. Another course, “Learning Chinese: Start From Scratch,” is suited to those with a basic grounding in Chinese. For those who want to better understand the culture and history of Taiwan, there are an intermediate Chinese course on “The Lovely Taiwan” and the FLTA Story Book Series. These free self-study resources are all accessible via the website of the Taiwan Mandarin Educational Resources Center (lmit.edu.tw), which currently offers ten ­different language options and has attracted more than 2.5 million visits over the past two years. There are also teaching materials put out by the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) for people of different language groups and ages, such as “Let’s Learn Chinese” and “Let’s Learn Mandarin,” which can be found on ­OCAC’s Huayuworld website (www.huayuworld.org).

Tamkang University’s Chinese Language Center offers a variety of customized classes for learning Mandarin. (courtesy of TKUCLC)

Study Mandarin in Taiwan

The more than 60 centers for Mandarin study in Taiwan offer flexible learning options, diverse curriculums, and even customized classes for students who request them. They also offer cultural courses in things like calligraphy, traditional Chinese painting, and martial arts, to give students who come to study Mandarin an even more enriching experience.

For example, National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center, the longest-established of these schools, offers a wide variety of classes, including seasonal courses in spring, summer, autumn and winter, as well as short-term classes. Meanwhile the Inter­national Chinese Language Program at NTU features intensive short-term courses, with a focus on oral and aural training followed by reading and writing skills. The program attracts many students from Ivy League schools in the US.

The Tamkang University Chinese Language Center (TKUCLC), which attracts the second highest number of students of any Huayu school in Taiwan, appeals to potential students with the availability of scholarships and individual guidance, and offers digital instruction using the “Modern Chinese” teaching materials developed jointly by seven schools. This not only permits a uniform approach to teaching and examinations, but the materials are well suited to overseas extension, and through them these schools can link up with overseas Huayu education.

Hesse H.H. Chou, chief of TKUCLC, notes that in only eight weeks of classes, the students sent to the school each year by the US Department of State and Department of Defense can be exposed to Chinese spoken by people with different pronunciations (such as children and the elderly) and can even skip two levels and pass the US Oral Proficiency Interview. This confirms the excellence of Taiwan’s Huayu teachers. The school even thoughtfully looks after all aspects of the students’ daily lives, for example by arranging for travel companions and cultural courses.

Overseas Community Affairs Council minister Hsu Chia-ching firmly believes that Taiwan has the ability to meet market demand for Mandarin language education.

OCAC’s Taiwan Centers for Mandarin Learning are tasked with educating students in cultural traditions and in Taiwan’s strengths. (courtesy of OCAC)

Taiwan: The best place to study Huayu

Hsu Chia-ching, the newly appointed OCAC minister, points out that Taiwan, which is free, democratic, and multicultural, offers a wealth of flexible instructional resources for Mandarin teaching and learning.

People who really want to learn Huayu should definitely come to Taiwan, says Hsu. She avers that Taiwan has three major advantages: The first is that Taiwan uses the traditional complex forms of Chinese characters, and only with a knowledge of traditional characters can one read classical literature and understand historic artifacts. The second is that in terms of learning efficiency, while tradi­tional characters are more difficult at first, people who know them can learn to read the simplified ones quickly, whereas those who know only simplified characters have problems reading tradi­tional characters. The third is that Taiwan’s teaching materials embrace modern values like gender equality. “For inter­national friends who share these values, it’s easier to adapt to Taiwan’s instructional approach.”

Chang Yu-hsin, who began teaching Chinese overseas 20 years ago, argues that Taiwan’s most valuable asset is tolerance—the ability to accept different cultures and ways of thinking. Taiwan’s training system for Mandarin instructors requires them to have cross-cultural teaching abilities: They must be able to understand and respect the cultures of different students and respect the cultural differences between themselves and others.

Taiwan has a free, safe and democratic social environment, and Taiwanese teachers can teach both complex and simplified characters. These are the main reasons why they are so well received overseas.

Huayu classes in schools for overseas compatriots are designed to be lively in order to enhance students’ interest in learning. (courtesy of OCAC)

Building a learning infrastructure

In order to build Taiwan into a major global center for studying Mandarin, the MOE has launched its Mandarin Education 2025 Program, which seeks to create a Huayu instructional system that can be applied anywhere in the world. The ministry previously developed the “Taiwan Benchmarks for the Chinese Language” (TBCL) and in September of 2022 published the “Reference Guidelines for TBCL Application.”

Chang Yu-hsin explains that there are more than 10,000 different Chinese characters, but through many years of research the National Academy of Educational Research has identified 3,100 core characters used to form 14,425 words. Students who master this vocabulary will basically be able to communicate at the level of a native speaker.

How can you find out how good your Chinese is? One way is to test yourself by using the free “Chinese Language Proficiency Quick Screening System 2.0” (cloudmock.sc-top.org.tw/m/), launched this year by by the Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency–Huayu (SC-TOP), which can test your Mandarin listening or reading skills within 30 minutes. The Quick Screening System, together with a language database, ­curriculum guidelines, and online courses, forms part of the language learning toolbox that is being actively promoted worldwide.

courtesy of TKUCLC

Students coming to study Mandarin in Taiwan can also gain a deeper understanding of Taiwan’s culture, geography, and society. (courtesy of OCAC)

Delivering Huayu education to the world

To develop Taiwan into a bastion of Mandarin edu­cation, the MOE and OCAC are working together to promote Huayu studies to the world.

In August 2022, the MOE commissioned the Taiwan Mandarin Educational Resources Center to pursue interagency collaboration to integrate the resources of nearly 90 Huayu educational institutions nation­wide, including both Mandarin study centers and university departments of applied Chinese.

As for how to attract people from around the globe to come and study Huayu in Taiwan, Taiwan offers a variety of scholarships and programs, such as Chinese language scholarships, the school-to-school Taiwan Huayu BEST–Bilingual Exchanges of Selected Talent Program, and subsidies for short-term study groups.

For example, in 2022, 7,022 students came to study at Mandarin study centers attached to Taiwanese universities, while 100 teachers trained at Chung Yuan Christian University, National Cheng Kung University and Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages were selected as members of groups that were sent to teach Mandarin in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. This program will be further expanded to other schools and countries in future.

Meanwhile, OCAC’s overseas-based Taiwan Centers for Mandarin Learning formally started operations in 2021, and as of 2023 there are a total of 66 centers, with 54 in the US and 12 in nine European countries. Hsu Chia-ching says that the plan is to bring that number to 100 within four years, including branching out into Oceania and Asia. The main target market for the centers is students aged over 18 whose mother tongue is not Chinese.

When Hsu Chia-ching was in Hamburg, Germany, during a visit to Europe in 2022, she suggested to the Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning located there that they should offer Mandarin Chinese classes specially for local engineers, because Taiwan is actively developing wind power and many engineers need to come and work in Taiwan for periods of six months to a year. They would find it very useful to learn some Huayu before they travel.

Hsu also visited a factory in Hungary recently set up by Taiwan’s Giant Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest bicycle maker by market share. This is Giant’s second European factory, in addition to its long-­established plant in the Netherlands. Most of the workers in the new facility are Eastern Europeans, and overcoming the language barrier has been a big challenge for management. During her visit, which was arranged by Liu Shih-chung, head of the Taipei Representative Office in Budapest, Hsu proposed that an OCAC Mandarin center could provide teachers for the company to offer Chinese language classes for local management personnel, such as ­human resources managers, as an employee benefit.

“Taiwan has the ability to meet the rising demand for Huayu education,” says Hsu. Besides the demand driven by Taiwan’s economic development and the establishment of overseas factories by Taiwanese firms, the shortage of people skilled in the Chinese language has been growing ever more acute.

Hsu concludes: “Taiwan has built up a great deal of experience, and we are fully prepared. Taiwan can help. If you want to study Mandarin Chinese, look to Taiwan.”

Chinese language teaching materials for students of differing levels.