CITU 3rd Academic Salon

On Wednesday morning, Confucius Institute at Tallinn University (CITU) had its third academic salon led by Prof. Ma Yunli who gave a talk on Teaching Chinese as A Foreign Language, which highlighted four aspects of difficulty in teaching Chinese to other language speakers, namely how to teach the Chinese phonetics; how to teach the students to orthographically write Chinese characters; how to teach synonyms with the knowledge of semantic, grammaticalized and prosodic interpretations.

In addition to these linguistics issues, the speaker also elaborated on the problems in the current textbooks. She argued that textbooks have to be edited in terms of the syllabi of the tests, in the light of learner’s interest, and possibly in parallel with the online learning program.

During the seminar, participants interacted much with the raised issues and quite many issues were agitated for further linguistic discussions.