Australia’s Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has helped spark a renaissance in the study of Asian languages, with record numbers of students signing up for Chinese, a major university said on Friday.
“There has been a significant increase in students wanting to study Mandarin, probably reflecting that we have a prime minister that speaks Chinese,” Australian National University’s (ANU) Kent Anderson said.
“But across the board Asian languages are proving popular with students which fits in nicely with the government’s languages program,” the head of the university’s Asian Studies faculty said in a statement.
There was a 23 percent increase overall in the number of Asian studies applicants for this year at the university, with growing demand for classes in Japanese, Thai, Korean and Vietnamese, he added.
Rudd, who became prime minister little more than a year ago, quickly put in place a A$62 million (US$44 million) Asian languages program for high schools.
By 2020 the program aims to have 12 percent of graduates fluent in either Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean.
“This is the Asia century, our No. 1 trade partner is China and our No. 1 export partner is Japan,” Anderson said. “It’s in our economic interests, it’s in our security interests to make that kind of investment.”
Rudd studied at the ANU in the 1970s, majoring in Chinese language and history before continuing his studies in Taiwan and going on to become a diplomat appointed to Beijing.
His fluent Mandarin — a unique skill among Western world leaders — has charmed Chinese from President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) to Beijing university students and impressed his countrymen since he came to power.
“The growing economy [of China] and the profile given to it by having the prime minister speak Chinese has an impact on the kind of people who are seeing the economic opportunities in China and other regional economies,” Anderson said.
But he expressed concern about a decline in Indonesian studies, which began after the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
With Indonesia being Australia’s closest neighbor it was critical to educate a new generation about the country, but government security warnings against travel there deterred students from in-country study, Anderson said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS