RSS Feed
June 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
“If you go the textbook way with all these Chinese
characters it just makes you intimidated,” said the Toyko-born model
and designer. “If you start with the colloquial way … or sexy clips it
is a different story.”
Would-be teachers are asked to submit a full-body photo, as well as any
relevant modelling or teaching experience
Mick Gleissner, the Hong Kong-based filmmaker who produces the videos, said he
hoped to inspire foreigners facing “the Herculean task of learning
Chinese.”
“Chinese is intimidating. You look at the characters, the strange melody
of sounds. And then you watch a video like this and it’s kind of ridiculous
but it’s also fun,” said Gleissner, originally from Regensburg,
Germany.
“The fun aspect I think is what is very much missing in the existing
approaches to language education.”
“If you want to learn to play the piano and you try to play Chopin of
course you are going to give up. But if you see a kid trying to play kid’s
songs … you’ll say, ‘Hey that’s kind of easy and fun.'”
The official language of the People’s Republic of China, Mandarin, or
Putonghua, is said to have nearly 900m native speakers and up to 1.4bn
speakers worldwide. China’s ongoing economic boom means it is studied in an
increasing number of classrooms across the globe.
Kaoru Kikuchi, the University of Nottingham architecture graduate behind
the site, said the project aimed to make Mandarin more accessible
“I was blown away when I visited some of my friends in LA and found that
their kids are learning Mandarin. It’s a cool language because China is now
becoming cool,” said Mr Gleissner.
Since 2004 Beijing has been promoting Chinese language and culture overseas,
building a global network of over 350 Confucius Institutes. In 2009 Xu Lin,
head of the Confucius Institute Headquarters told Reuters around 40m
foreigners were learning Chinese. But Xu expressed frustration at how
tuition and learning levels remained “very weak” compared to
English, French or Spanish.
Users of Youku, China’s answer to YouTube, joked that SexyMandarin.com might
help change this. “The Americans are so happy learning Chinese,”
beamed one, using the name Guo Shibo. “We would not go through so much
pain if we learnt English the same way.”
A user on the video website Ku6 wrote: “So eye-catching and
heart-throbbing. No wonder they can learn it well!”
Others are less impressed. Annie Chan, chairwoman of Hong Kong’s Association
for the Advancement of Feminism, told one newspaper SexyMandarin.com “exoticised”
Chinese women.
Sue-Mei Thompson, executive director of Hong Kong’s Women’s Foundation, told
the China Daily newspaper her group was “vehemently opposed to gender
stereotyping, especially anything that objectifies women as sex objects”.
“Sexy Mandarin looks oddly dated,” she added.
Wu Yue, a teacher from Beijing’s Mandarin Connection school, said the site’s
teaching-style was “just about calling attention”.
“It is very entertaining, and might be good for marketing and promotion,
but [it is] not good for serious language learning,” she said. “Students
would get easily distracted during a class featuring sexual content.”
Mr Gleissner said the website’s “viral” success was a sign that
global attentions were shifting east.
“When I grew up … the thing that was your goal if you got rich and
successful [was that] you could move to the US. Not so anymore. If you talk
to young people today they say, ‘Forget the US, there’s China, there’s
India, there are all these emerging markets.'”
Posted in 
Tags: 
