學務|学务 Academics

Learning Mandarin Chinese can be incredibly useful as it allows one to be able to communicate, make friends, and conduct business with 16% of the world's population (~1.4 billion people). Additionally, learning a new language stimulates the brain, and exposure to the culture can allow for the improvement of artistic skills along with increased appreciation for authentic Chinese cuisine.

Mandarin is the most common dialect of Chinese. Within Mandarin Chinese, there are two main categories of Chinese characters (漢字|汉子 Hànzi): Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau while Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. Traditional Chinese characters may look a bit more complicated, but they tend to preserve the original visual meanings and have been widely used for more than a millennium. Moreover, they can be found in most classical materials as well as traditional works of art such as calligraphy and paintings.

Given more than 80% of Chinese characters are pictophonetic (or so-called phonetic-semantic) components consisting of a “radical,” reflecting the meaning and a traceable phonetic component for the pronunciation, the Chinese characters can be considered phonetic. Therefore, it may be easier to learn as the completeness of the traditional writing system conserves the differentiation between words, which often retain meaningful symbols closer to their pictorial origins. Once establishing a foundation in Traditional Chinese, picking up the simplified character set is easier than the other way around [1, 2 ].

Is there any empirical evidence that simplifying characters results in easier learning? Simplified Chinese characters indeed contain fewer strokes and may be easier to remember for new learners. However, current evidence suggests that the actual effort involved in learning Mandarin in either traditional or simplified writing systems appears to be pretty much the same. In addition, the Pinyin (拼音 Pīnyīn) input method utilizes the Roman alphabet allows a user to type either traditional or simplified Chinese characters!

Here at WCMA, we promote Traditional Character Mandarin to our students while all of our textbooks also include simplified characters for their reference. We hope you'll join us in appreciating the beauty of the traditional Chinese culture.

想認識真正的中華文化就不得不學習正體字！為溝通、因應趨勢，則不能不看懂簡體字以及用漢語拼音！所以本校教學以採用中華民國僑務委員會所提供教材為主，學員除了學習正體字之外也認識簡體字，使用拼音系統則讓學員可以快速學習中文發音也能隨時打出想要的字體！

本校以教授繁体字为主，简体字为辅，拼音系统为骨，以期学员能够轻轻松松学习汉语、体验中华文化！