Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers.
“It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another.
The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the west who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional subjects such as Spanish or German.
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