Learning Chinese language helps Americans know differentworld

(Xinhua) 14:55, May 11, 2014

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LOS ANGELES, May 10 -- "The ancient China has a great saying which is there is nothingon heaven to fear, there is nothing on earth to fear, there is only one thing to fear thatKevin Rudd is still speaking Chinese," the former Australian prime minister began hisspeech in such a humorous way.

Rudd was speaking at the three-day 2014 National Chinese Language Conference in LosAngeles that concluded Saturday.

Known that most of the 1,200 audience are educators, especially those who teach Chinesein America, Rudd expressed his thanks and honor to them."Because your position is muchmore important than mine or any one else who comes from the official class. Because thefuture really does lie in your hands."

Rudd, who grew up on a farm in rural area of Australia, shared with the listeners his storyabout learning Chinese.

In the small country town where he lived in his early life, there was only one school of lessthan 200 kids and four teachers.

One day, his mother, a simple country woman, gave him a local newspaper with a largephotograph in which a Chinese delegate took his seat for the first time at the UN SecurityCouncil. And she said to him: "This is important for the world. Remember this day, andthink about it in the future."

The picture and his mother's words aroused Rudd's interest in China. When he finishedhigh school, he went to Sydney and met members of the Chinese community there for thefirst time. Then he became "slowly familiar with the warmth of their hospitality, theimportance in their lives of centrality of family, the essential nature of community, and theveneration for an action culture."

"Very soon I became deeply and profoundly interested in this part of the world," he said.He studied at the Australian National University in Canberra, majoring in Chinese history,Chinese literature and Chinese philosophy and he became proficient in Mandarin.

"In the in-dividing period since then until now whether I have either been a student, adiplomat, a business man, a foreign minister or a prime minister, is that China has been acommon thing of my adult life, in all things I have done," he told the audience.

The National Chinese Language Conference is the largest annual gathering in the UnitedStates of teachers, administrators, and policymakers engaged in teaching Chinese languageand culture. The meeting is co-organized by the College Board and Asia Society incollaboration with Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban).

The United States has the largest number of Confucius Institutes and Classrooms, with100 and more than 360 ones respectively. More than 220,000 American students arestudying Chinese in these institutes in 2014.

"The Confucius Institute is not just about language, it is about culture," David Coleman,president of the College Board, told Xinhua.

"The Confucius Institute and Confucius Classroom offer a model to build a trust (betweenChina and America), because trust must be based on understanding. What a ConfuciusInstitute does is that it invites students across this country to not only learn a language butto understand," Coleman said.

From 2013 to 2014, five new Confucius Institutes have been set up. They start to workwith school districts around America to promote the learning of the Chinese language.

"The Chinese language and culture in America is growing very quickly. There is perhaps norelationship that would be more important in the future in our world than for China andthe United States to begin to more deeply understand one and another," Coleman said. "We see that American students recognize that it is powerful for their future to do goodwork, to explore the world, to understand Chinese."

Apart from those educators who teach Chinese in Confucius Institutes or ConfuciusClassrooms, more and more common people in the United States are willing to learn andteach Chinese in the country.

Jessica Beinecke, a popular journalist in China for her online video program "OMG! Meiyu"(literally, "OMG! American language"), updates her video shows for teaching Chinesepeople American slang and culture everyday. Her daily online show has garnered over 40million video views.

Beinecke recently launched a program called "Crazy Fresh Chinese" to teach Americanstudents one Chinese slang everyday. "I want to empower my viewers with useful globalskills and bring the Chinese language to life," she said.

Jason Loose is a 2012 graduate of Arizona State University. After his graduation, he had achance to spend a year in Nanjing, capital city of east China's Jiangsu Province, studyingChinese and pedagogy. When he came back to America, he joined Thousand Oaks HighSchool in Thousand Oaks, California, to teach the Chinese language and culture.

Loose started to learn Chinese in 2007. Talking about that, he said: "I found China issomewhere that goes with a lot of change and somewhere in the middle of fastdevelopment when I was reading about it."

"Everyone who went there has learned so much and experienced so much. Sometimes theyhad even just changed a lot as a person. I didn't always see that happening of people whoare studying other languages, it seems like Chinese is the one that happens most. Itattracted me to learn Chinese," Loose said.

He loves to share his experience in China with his students and on culture days he wouldlike to show them video clips on China to help them understand the culture beneathappearance.

"I have showed them a video about a Chinese person traveling home for Chunjie (ChineseLunar New Year). They saw all the little things in the video that showed how important itis to be with your family on New Year day, how tight family relationships are and howimportant the family is in China," he said. "That's what we called 'let the culture speaksfirst.'"

"Many young people see learning Chinese and learning this culture a way of transformingtheir everyday life," Coleman said. "It's a generation of young Americans looking fordifferent worlds in which they can do good work."

（Editor：DuMingming、Yao Chun）