Why Learn Chinese?

There are many reasons! First, Chinese is the language of Nearly 1/4 of the World's Population. Speakers of Chinese not only live in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, but also spread throughout Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe, where large Chinese communities congregate. Chinese people today have been playing increasingly important roles worldwide.

Second, learning Chinese is an extraordinary and agreeable experience through which you can immerse yourself in a different culture. Unlike most languages, Chinese has a unique ideographic writing system, which provides visual comprehensibility. The grammatical structure of Chinese is not only logical, but also pragmatic, related to the particular way of Chinese thinking. Knowledge of the written language opens up the culture of one of the world's oldest civilizations.

Third, traditional Chinese culture, from Confucianism and Chan Buddhism to martial arts and Chinese cuisine, has an enormous influence on East and Southeast Asian nations. Chinese culture has also greatly inspired the western world through Marco Polo, G. W. Leibniz, Max Weber, Franz Kafka, Andre Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound, and Luis Borges, among others.

Last, but not least, the People's Republic of China currently boasts the fastest growing economy in the world and is widely regarded as the potentially biggest global market in the twenty-first century. Proficient speakers of Mandarin Chinese will find jobs in various fields such as business, government, international relations, information technology, tourism, education, translation and much, much more. Of all foreign languages at American universities and colleges, Chinese shows the highest proportional increase in enrollment. Los Angeles Chinese Learning Center, on the other hand, provides Chinese class at flexible schedule for working adults at reasonable rates.

Many of our students at Los Angeles Chinese Learning Center take Chinese language lessons for the purpose of working in China in the future, as now there are many opportunities to do so. Some people from our Chinese language school learn Chinese for general cultural reasons (read Kevin Deselms article, "Reflections of a First Year Mandarin Student"), others choose our private Chinese tutoring services because they are interested in languages. A few of our students learn Chinese just for challenge, as they believed (but later proven to be wrong) that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn, because Mandarin Chinese is not as difficult as they thought.

Also, see more information on "Learn Chinese Characters"