Chinese Newspaper Reports: Time to Learn Chinese...in France
And I'm looking across the Taiwan Strait to China. Got this from the Chinese paper, The People's Daily. Er...yeah. Not my usual news source, but this time I had to note this, because it's another little twirly dance step in that tango France and China have been locked in for the last few months.
First, France rolls out the red carpet for China and gives them a grand parade down the Champs Elysees back in January. Then France leads the charge to try and get the EU to lift its ban on arms sales to China (the debate's still going). Then France joins China for naval drills oh-so-conveniently timed to coincide with the Taiwanese presidential election. And generally backs up China where Taiwan's concerned.
And now I read the following. It's a little "Engrish-y," but perfectly intelligible:
"Teaching of Chinese Language Made Headway in France."
Check out this blurb!
| On March 26, the all France Chinese Language Teaching Seminar was held at the Paris International University Town. The statistics given by attendees showed that the teaching of Chinese language in France maintained a good development trend. As learned from Jean-Paul de Gaudemar, the education ministry's director of schools, students taking Chinese language course have kept on rising, whereas the number of students taking other foreign languages has dropped. If compared with traditionally learned foreign languages, i.e. German and Russian, the number of students studying Chinese is not numerous, but the development trend is good. Compared with last year, the number of students who study Chinese rose by 30 percent in 2004, while students studying Russian and German decreased by 3.5 and 8.6 percent respectively. In the past ten years, number of students who took Chinese as their first foreign language rose over 75 percent, and those selecting Chinese as second foreign language went up by 170 percent. Currently 142 high schools in Paris offer Chinese language courses with student number amounts to 7,361. There are 500 pupils in Paris and some one thousand in other provinces who study Chinese language. |
Am I the only person who thinks all this is kind of...well, freaky weird?
ON A RELATED NOTE:
There have been reports that the French language isn't doing too well. Check this out:
The use of French in decline in the EU, as more and more EU folks use...English! This was reported a while back by French paper, Le Monde, among others: "Avec l'élargissement, l'usage du français recule dans les institutions européennes."
The UK paper The Guardian even reports that the French government is trying to get the new EU'ers to learn French -- and offering art, wine, culture, and free French lessons to do it. Sounds a bit pathetic to me, though the headline's a little...PG-13: "Paris seduces new Europeans with joys of the French tongue."
But for all the French fretting that the language is in decline in diplomatic circles, it seems that the French are as snarky as ever. Check out this small but telling comment:
The French are also worried that the number of languages in the new EU will lead to a breakdown of translation services, and delegates will switch to English simply to make themselves understood at conferences. 'As soon as some Latvian says he can't speak French, we'll all have to change to English,' sighed one French diplomat. |
Not too diplomatic, y'think?
And FYI, no, I personally don't speak French. I do Taiwanese, English, Spanish, and a bit of Italian. I can read some German, I keep meaning to brush up my hopeless Mandarin Chinese, and I do my nerdwork in ancient Greek and Latin.
(And really, if you have Latin and Spanish, you can pretty much make sense of the French papers without knowing every last bit of French grammar...OK, I guess I'll now get flooded with hate mail from Francophiles, but oh well. C'est la vie, people!)