Learn Chinese – Students
Posted on May 17, 2009
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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 is an important player, and has made considerable efforts to help introduce Chinese at public schools. The government has authorized $1,3 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, you can imagine the potential of low cost talent and accessing a vast sea of abundant. 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 manufacturing, IT, customer support, 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.
China requires people that understand the best practices in their new free economy, because of the recent tilt towards rapid growth, free market economies and increasing numbers of skilled workers. Many of these new positions will be filled by MBA graduates from Chinese speaking US and European institutions, well versed in finance, 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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