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.

Three Little Pigs - Chinese style

Following on from Tina's earlier post about Pigs I thought I would share this interesting flash cartoon movie. Its the story of the Three Little Pigs; the catch.... its all in Chinese! It includes the script in Chinese characters, pinyin and English. Its hilarious... Enjoy!

http://www.chineseblast.com/node/118

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!!