When you were a baby, it was hard to understand your mother tongue because you were not used to it.
Now, thanks to the language skills of an American linguist, you can communicate in a way that’s not just limited to Mandarin.
“It’s amazing that a whole new generation is being taught Mandarin now, but it was only about five or six years ago,” Dr Richard Leibold, from the University of New South Wales, said.
“You could probably speak it with a person from the UK, and it was a little more advanced than what we’re talking about today.”
We’ve done this in Australia, and we have some great Mandarin teachers in Australia.
He said learning Chinese in a virtual environment was a significant step forward for Australians.””
We have a Mandarin-only online learning app that we have designed to give people who are learning Chinese a voice that they would be missing out on,” Dr Leibould said.
He said learning Chinese in a virtual environment was a significant step forward for Australians.
“There are no physical locations where people can learn Mandarin, so you need to go online and meet the people in your country and talk to them about the culture, language, history and culture of the country,” Dr Leo said.
For the next five years, Dr Leiberlds team will be providing virtual Mandarin-language tutors in Australia.
“This is the biggest challenge we’ve faced in a long time, because we’re not used a lot of Mandarin speakers, and this is our first opportunity to get some people to speak Chinese,” Dr Lisa told ABC Radio.
The Mandarin tutor project has attracted more than 30,000 Chinese participants, and the project has already received funding from the Australian Government.
“When we started this project, we had just a couple of people and they had never actually spoken Mandarin before,” Dr Martin said.
The Mandarin-speakers will be given the option to learn Chinese online, or in the virtual environment, where they can speak to Chinese language teachers, and practise conversational Mandarin.
The team is hoping to increase the number of Chinese speakers by 15 per cent per year, with the aim of having at least 100 Mandarin speakers in Australia by 2020.
The virtual tutor project is also supported by the China Institute of Excellence, which is a Chinese language university and centre in Melbourne.
“Chinese is a big cultural language, so learning it from an international perspective, we know how important it is,” Dr James said.
Topics:linguaistics,language,education,cultural-migration,education-facilities,social-media,education
