Teaching of Chinese language in Cuba still scarce, says professor

HAVANA, Cuba, Oct 13 (acn) Although Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world and China's second largest trading partner of Cuba, teaching of the language in the Caribbean country is still scarce and is not included in higher education.

In an interview with the media, Arsenio German, director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Havana (UH), the main institution responsible for the dissemination of the language and culture of the Asian nation, gave an overview of the prospects for its teaching on the island.

A Bachelor Degree in Chinese Language started to be taught from 2007 to 2010 by the UH Faculty of Foreign Languages, but the conditions to continue offering it were not created, especially since there are not enough teachers with the necessary skills to teach that profile, he said.

In general, in Latin America there are very few specialized translators in that language, some have learned it in Cuba, but they are insufficient, considering the good relations between the two countries, he added.
Moreover, we have the Confucius Institute, unique academy in our country with five Chinese teachers and it is authorized to apply international certification examinations, he noted.

However, that title is not equivalent to a degree, it simply means that you have an advanced level of Chinese as a second language, and that is not enough to work as an interpreter for a business meeting or to translate an article, because reading and writing in that language are more complicated than speaking.

Today we have more and better trained teachers thanks to the help of the Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, so we may have the conditions to reopen the course, meanwhile, our school is still a good option, and with the new building we will have, maybe we can teach thousand students per year, he stated.

The headquarters of the Confucius Institute in Havana was founded in 2009, and so far over two thousand Cubans have taken classes there completely free. This is the only branch of this network of institutes imparting courses free of charge.