Students in action

Mandarin Corner brought a battle against the sexes as we split the boys and girls up to play some games in Chinese. In the photos below our students are playing a game where they choose an envelope full of words and must make a correct sentence from them and then say what it means.

People are competitive by nature and it was no difference here as the boys were in minus points and the girls were up in the lead...... but it was not long before the guys fought back and won the game - still with disputes over our points system!!

Mandarin Corner - 11th March

Next month we will hold our third Mandarin Corner on Sunday 11th March. It will be a chance for our students, their friends and anyone else to come along and practice their Mandarin. Our trainers will organise fun games in Chinese so feel free to pop in and take a look.

Choosing the right language

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? - - Trilingual
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? - - Bilingual
What do you call someone who speaks one language? - - British!

For most Brits learning another language usually means dabbling with French and German at school then stopping there. It is easy to blame our lack of enthusiasm for languages on history, laziness, being an island race or simply that English is the ‘world’ language. Why do we need to learn a different language? Why learn French? Or German? They should speak English, shouldn't they?!!!

Maybe all along it was more a question of choosing the right language. Over the last few years the UK has witnessed a huge demand for the Chinese language, and not just at university level, but right down to primary schools. It might not be overtaking French and German just yet, but as we can see from recent stories in the news, the numbers studying Mandarin are on the up. Here are a couple of interesting articles:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1698082,00.html

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=386448

Working for New Concept Mandarin I am bound to say that mastering Chinese brings great benefits, but now the world is saying the same!! This trend is not only in the UK, but all over the world so there will be more to post soon, but for now, choose Mandarin!!