Learning Chinese at a Tender Age(pic)

On May 12th, An Huixin an 8-year-old Korean took the Young Learners Chinese Test (YCT) in Korea. On the same day 3000 Korean youth and children throughout the whole country took the YCT organized by the Office of Chinese Languages Council International（Hanban）.

In the morning of May 12th, nearly 100 parents gathered in Jiuyi High School, Seoul, Korea. They would eagerly look at the teaching building now and then or raised their hands to check the time because more than 300 youth and children were there to take the first YCT in Korea. Some parents accompanied their children to the school and they exchanged experiences about their children’s Chinese learning.

In the examination, the children were arranged according to their language proficiency, and their listening, reading and writing skills were tested between levels 1 to 3. According to the rules set by Hanban, the examination candidates are youth and children under the age of 15. Therefore this is the first formal examination for many children.

In one of the examination halls on the third floor, the reporter saw a child taking the level 2 test writing attentively on the answer sheet with a pencil. She was so short that her legs could even not touch the ground when she sat on the chair for high school students. When she was doing the examination, she was also swinging her legs back and forth. She looks really cute.

In the morning, more than 3000 Korean youth and children in various examination sites, such as Seoul, Busan, Incheon and Kwangju, took this 1 hour examination. Although the examinees are all children, the examination was conducted in Chinese. It is very hard to understand or answer the examination accurately if the examinees do not have a certain level of Chinese language proficiency.

After the examination, the reporter asked one of the children in Korean whether the examination was difficult. To his surprise, the naive girl answered “no” in Chinese.

Then the reporter began to talk to her in Chinese. This clever little girl told me in standarded Putong Hua that her name is An Huixin. She is 8 years old and just started her first year of elementary school. She has learned Chinese only for one and a half years. Every week she will have a one-hour class at home with a tutor. Last July An Huixin received a prize in a national Chinese speech contest for children and at that time she had just learned Chinese for a few months.

An Huixin’s mother told the reporter that An Huixin has a strong interest in learning Chinese so she makes progress rapidly. Her biggest desire is to go to China to see the places introduced in the Chinese textbooks and to chat with Chinese children.

Coming out of the examination hall with An Huixin were a couple of sisters. The elder sister is Cui Jiaying 14 years old and the younger sister is Cui Xiaozhen 10 years old. These two girls have lived in Weihai, China with their parents for 6 years and just they came back to Korea last year. They speak Chinese fluently. When the reporter asked Cui Xiaozhen how she did in her examination, she blinked her eyes and said: “I am not happy with my essay.”

When the reporter asked Cui Jiaying who speaks better Chinese: “Which language do you speak more fluently, Chinese or Korean?”

She answered at once: “Chinese Of course. I completed my elementary school in China.”

When they were asked what do they missed most in China, the two sisters answered unanimously: “Dumplings, Dumplings are very delicious.”

An Yuxiang, Education Consul for the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of Korea observed the examination. Consul An expressed that since the establishment of Sino-Korean diplomatic relations 15 years ago, the cooperation and exchanges between the two countries have been growing. With the continuous development of the Chinese economy and the expanding economic and trade cooperation between the two countries, Chinese language has become so popular that an increasing number of Korean parents are making their children learn Chinese. YCT fulfils the needs of Korean youth and children in testing their Chinese proficiency and it is also a way to help them get to know more about China, which helps promote exchanges between the two countries.

Cui Yongji, manager of Project Department of Education Rainbow Company, the undertaker of YCT expressed that holding the YCT will not only provide an opportunity for Korean youth and children to test their Chinese proficiency, but can also help arouse and cultivate their interests in learning Chinese. This will lay a good social foundation for future friendly exchanges between the two countries.

Korea will also hold another 2 YCT in September and November this year. The goal for the year is 8000 people will take the test.

Cui Yongji said: “ If a child learns Chinese at a very young age, there is a high likelihood that he will not give up Chinese in his life. Even the people around him will become interested in Chinese or China. Many parents whose children took the test started to care about China after their children begin to learn Chinese. They also begin to learn some simple Chinese in order to communicate with their children in Chinese.

According to statistics, there are currently more than 300,000 people in Korea learning Chinese in various ways. 131 universities set up a Chinese department and over 1000 high schools started offering Chinese as a second foreign language. Since the founding of the first Confucius Institute in the world in 2004 in Seoul, another 9 Confucius Institutes have been established in Korea. In 2006, the number of adult candidates, who sat for the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, reached 3,7000.