THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: China's growing importance in the world has convinced millions to start learning Mandarin, but how many will end up able to speak one of the world's most difficult languages?
Earlier this year, my Chinese teacher in Shanghai told me he was leaving China.
For the next two years, he plans to live with his wife, who is also a teacher, in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. They will live and work at the local Confucius Institute and help spread Mandarin into central Asia.
It may seem an odd choice to swap the bright lights of China's most advanced city for an unstable and relatively poor former Soviet state, but the Confucius Institutes are a key part of Chinese government policy, and the Chinese government evidently made it worth their while to go.
Since 2005, China has rolled out more than 300 Confucius Institutes in 94 countries in order to help the rest of the world learn a language that is increasingly important but devilishly challenging.
The Chinese government claims that 230,000 people have enrolled so far and they cannot meet the demand. China is sending 5,000 teachers abroad each year and now wants 1,000 institutes to be open by the end of the decade. » | Malcolm Moore, Shanghai | Tuesday, September 20, 2011
