USEFUL LINKS
Please note that the website links offered below are mentioned on a 'all care, no responsibilty' basis. Please report bad or missing links to us. If you think we should include a link, please let us know too.
For Chinese Mandarin studies
Mandarintools: This comprehensive and largely useful website provides tools to people who are already studying and using Chinese.
Zhongwen : A very impressive website with all things Chinese and will certainly help you learn more about Chinese language and culture.
Interesting News on Chinese Studies
Building an Asia-literate Australia: an Australian strategy for Asian language proficiency Michael Wesley
Australia needs half of the population to be fluent in an Asian language within 30 years or risk falling behind other countries, this report has found. Australia must abandon its monolingual mindset to keep pace with economic and political power houses of China, India, Japan and Indonesia, according to this study by Griffith Asia Institute Director Professor Michael Wesley. The report says two-thirds of Australians under forty need to speak a second language and the number of Australians studying an Asian language needs to quadruple within a generation. Strong government investment in “human infrastructure” was as crucial as physical infrastructure. Read more...... download the rest of this article.
Schools set Asian lingo challenge Josh Gordon
THE Federal Government has quietly launched a $62 million Asian language plan with an ambitious goal to double within a decade the number of year 12 students fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean. Education Minister Julia Gillard conceded that achieving the target would be a major challenge because participation in some Asian languages had troublingly been "going in the wrong direction". "In just four years between 2001 and 2005, which coincided with the abolition of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Program in 2002, the number of Government school students studying Indonesian and Japanese declined by about 60,000, while the number enrolled in Chinese languages increased only marginally," she said. Read more...... download the rest of this article.
Future depends on Asian languages Guy Healy
AUSTRALIANS risk being marooned in the dated jobs and industries of the 20th century unless a $11.3 billion mass Asian language literacy plan is acted on within a generation, according to Michael Wesley, a leading expert on international relations. Ahead of today's Sydney launch of a report documenting "a precipitous decline" in the study of languages at universities, Professor Wesley said it was not enough to rely on a fluent elite to project Australia's interests in the region. Read more...... download the rest of this article.
