Taiwan on Sunday opened the first branch of the Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning in Ireland.
The center in Dublin would soon start accepting students, the Taipei Representative Office in Ireland said.
At the opening ceremony, Representative to Ireland Yang Tzu-pao (楊子葆) highlighted the center’s differences from similar institutions in Ireland.
Photo: CNA
There would be no limits when studying at the center and students would be in an environment that facilitates open learning, the office quoted Yang as saying.
The center is more attuned to traditional Chinese culture and values, as Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters, he said.
Yang said he believes that the freedom-loving Irish would support the values that the center would convey in its classes.
The ceremony was also attended by center director Evan Furlong (劉淑慧), Dublin School of Mandarin Chinese chairperson Hsu Hsiao-ping (許曉平), Irish Senator Gerry Horkan and Dublin City Councilor Declan Flanagan, as well as other local and foreign dignitaries.
Horkan told the ceremony that as a member of the Irish parliament, which looks to cement concrete ties with Taiwan, he was happy to see the increase in collaborations between the countries.
He expressed the hope that with language as a tool, the center would help advance bilateral relations.
Hopefully, the center will play an important role in Mandarin’s growing popularity in Ireland, Flanagan said, adding that the language would be made an elective in Ireland’s standardized high-school examinations in June.
Furlong thanked the Overseas Community Affairs Council and the office for working with the Dublin School of Mandarin Chinese to establish the center, which is one of 27 that the council plans to open in Europe and the US this year.
The council worked with other groups to open 18 such centers in the US and Europe last year as part of its plan to support and collaborate with established Chinese-language schools abroad.
Fifteen of the schools are in the US, with one each in the UK, Germany and France.
By the end of this year, the council plans to have 35 Mandarin teaching centers.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS