Another talking point was the Proficiency-Huayu (TOP-Huayu) exam that is being developed to replace the Chinese Proficiency Test, currently used in local classrooms to measure Mandarin ability. The MOE has established a steering committee to supervise its evolution and hopes it will supersede China's Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (漢語水平考試), or HSK exam.
This is a long shot, according to critics on local Internet forums, some of whom said operating a separate system would make CSL students less likely to come to Taiwan as HSK was universally accepted and employers would not recognize the TOP-Huayu, even if it was better.
This attitude does not take into account, however, that Taiwan's CSL market is based on traditional characters, rather than China's simplified script. Many students of Mandarin will pick China to learn the language simply because it teaches the language that 98 percent of the Chinese-language world writes, the simplified characters or jian ti zi (簡體字) developed by China to boost literacy. Taiwan is the only country still using traditional script and officially bans simplified characters.
Even so, many students, teachers, course directors and officials defend the teaching of traditional characters and said they believed learning simplified script is not as easy or as useful as its backers thought. NTU teacher and administrator Lu Cui-ying (盧翠英) said simplified characters were easier to write but not remember.
There are a lot of synonyms in Chinese, she said. Therefore, if the characters are similar this causes problems with reading. "Using traditional characters makes it easier to read," she said, adding China's literacy rate was much lower than Taiwan's 98 percent. "Actually, having learned traditional characters it is easy to learn the simplified ones, but not the other way around."
"Our system is unique," said NTNU director Chou, "The shapes of the characters give a meaning and a sound. This is the beauty and practical efficiency of traditional script. We have a hundred teachers and most of them will say that if students are taught simplified characters to begin with they will learn faster, compared with traditional characters. But after level two or three it is the other way round … Especially with computers, there is no reason to use simplified characters and I would be surprised if the advantages of traditional characters were not appreciated more in the future."
One student of Mandarin who has tried both Taiwan and China is Diana Freundl, who is media officer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (and a former Taipei Times' reporter). Both places were good for studying Chinese, she said, the most important thing was to immerse oneself in the language.
"No-one is going to learn Chinese through osmosis. I had to submerge myself in the language and study for eight hours a day but in the end I did learn to read and write in eight months."
"Teaching Chinese is not a zero-sum game," concluded MOE executive secretary Chih, "The market is growing and often healthy competition makes it bigger. There is space for all of us. This is what we should be thinking about in the future."
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