More and more foreign students are packing their bags and headed for Taipei to study Chinese. Why do they choose Taiwan?

After learning the language, many people go to Mainland China to make their living. Why should Taiwan train qualified people for the mainland?

Chinese is considered one of the three most difficult languages in the world. (The other two are Russian and Arabic.) Since it's known as a difficult language, many foreign students are reluctant to take a course in Chinese at school so as not to affect their grade point average.

The question is, "Is Chinese really all that difficult?"

Chou Chih-p'ing, associate professor at Princeton University, doesn't fully agree.

"As far as speaking is concerned, I don't think that Chinese poses a special difficulty for the Western student. Most problems occur with the four tones," he says. Chinese verbs do not change tenses, nouns are not singular or plural, and there is no problem of gender. Chinese declarative sentences and sentence structure are almost completely the same as English.

Students' response to this problem is another matter. Many say that they have studied many years of Chinese but forget characters in a short time after learning them. For some it's even difficult to construct a sentence.

"The main reason for this problem is that foreigners lack the environment in which to study and practice their Chinese," says Peng-cheng Tong, Vice Secretary-General of the World Chinese Language Association.

Teachers of Chinese abroad suggest to students that if they are interested in learning Chinese they should move to an environment in which solely Chinese is used. There are only two places throughout the world that meet this standard--Taiwan and Mainland China.

Which is best?

Most people feel that the mainland is naturally the best place to study the traditional Peking dialect. This is understandable. Many people study Chinese with future plans of developing their careers on the mainland, and feel that they should go there to become acquainted with local politics, the system, and society.

"Because of the close ties between the Chinese Communists and European nations there is a constant exchange of professors and students. So a fare number of students went to the mainland up until the seventies to study Chinese," says Li Chen-ch'ing, director of the Mandarin Training Center at National Taiwan Normal University.

Since the end of the seventies a gradual change has been taking place, as more and more students have been turning to Taiwan instead. The reasons are worth pondering.

"I'm too old to rough it," says Peter Eberly, a 35-year-old American from Cleveland, Ohio, who has been in Taiwan for over four years now and is studying Chinese while working as a translator for a magazine at the same time. He says that he likes to sleep comfortably, eat well, and be able to take a soothing shower every day. Life on the mainland just doesn't cut it.

"Many young Americans are used to the good life. Many of those who decide to go to the mainland usually end up on Taiwan after three months," says Professor Ho Shang-hsien at the University of Hawaii with a laugh.

Those short on cash like to come to Taiwan even more. According to estimates by Li Chen-ch'ing, more than 95 percent of the foreign students who come to Taiwan to study Chinese teach English. Some don't have to spend a cent of the money that they bring with them. Here they are completely self-sufficient.

On the mainland classes are filled with problems. Those who have been there say that the mainland has yet to devise a systematic way of teaching. They teach foreigners the same way they would teach a Chinese person. The students repeat a sentence over and over, and write characters many times, but they don't understand why they are spoken or written the way they are.

"This is not feasible for the adult student," says Li Ying-che, "Adults have to understand the workings behind things. They need to understand the origin of the characters and the structure of the language in a systematic way. They certainly can't be treated like children."

Another big problem on the mainland for those who are seriously interested in studying Chinese is simplified characters.

The presently simplified characters created by the Chinese Communists are widely used throughout the world. Many foreign students feel that the simplified characters are an important step in China's modernization, and that traditional characters are too troublesome to write.

"But simplified characters pose practical problems. Ancient books are all written in traditional style characters. If you can only recognize the simplified form, then there's almost no way of getting acquainted with people from the past."