With China’s increasing development on all sides, more and more westerners become interested in learn Mandarin. In Germany, the Chinese language learning is so popular that many Chinese language schoolsand institutions are set up in recent years to satisfy the Chinese language learners’ desire.

However, in the process of learning Chinese language, different people from different cultures can make various typical mistakes. It makes foreigners produce different feelings about how to learn Chinese language. In the following parts, we will introduce the present Chinese teaching conditions and relevant teaching strategies according to the Doctor Gu Anda.

In his opinion, the existing European language framework standard does not apply to the Chinese language teaching because it does not take the characteristics of Chinese language into consideration. Therefore, most German feel it is very difficult to study Chinese. Besides, the Chinese writing system is complex. Therefore, they should set up a separate classification standard for reading and writing skills training according to the Chinese characteristics except for the existing European language frame.

The good news is that the European Union are supporting the Chinese learning and teaching program. Under its support, many universities are trying to build a European common framework standard for Chinese language teaching. Those westerners who learn Chinese in China may be familiar with these universities. They are Free University of Berlin in Germany, School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Université de Rennes in France and University of Rome. If everything goes smoothly, this project will be completed within two years.

Let’s move our attention to the problems that learners in Germany often face during the process when they learn Chinese language in Mandarin learning courses. According to Doctor Gu’s experience of Chinese language learning and his knowledge about Chinese language teaching, the learners who regard German as the mother tongue will face dual challenges of culture and language when learning Chinese.

There are four difficult points in the dual challenges, namely, the Chinese character system, the different four tones, the vocabulary, the parts of speech as well as the morphology. The previous alphabetic writing is easy to master in a short time. However, for those Chinese language learners in Chinese language school, they should master about 1,500 to 3,000 Chinese characters to understand the article. But it will take a very long time. The peculiar tones phenomenon in Chinese language is also a difficult point for European learners.

In addition, Chinese language lack of common vocabulary of foreign languages in Europe. The spoken language and written language are greatly different. Besides, learners fail to find the European language vocabularies and syntactic functions in Chinese language. All of the reasons above make it difficult for those who go to school to study Mandarin in vocabulary learning, parts of speech learning as well as syntactic functions learning.

Now, the problem is that how can we train Chinese language learners’ capability of listening, speaking, reading and writing under such a circumstance. Doctor Gu holds that they should train differently in accordance with the various learning goals of different learning community. Teachers in Mandarin language courses in China may take the example that the Chinese learning goals in Germany shouldn’t be placed at training students’ comprehensive ability in listening, speaking, reading and writing.

He thinks it is not going to work because the emphasizing point should be the listening and speaking ability. For instance, when teachers teach Mandarin language, they can based on the Chinese Pinyin to practice students to master the basic Chinese language communicative ability, thus reaching the A2 level in the European frame. As for the characters, no demand or fewer demands are needed in this period. It depends on the students’ language background.

When students’ language learning reaches the intermediate and advanced levels, the training of reading and writing skills can rely on the real written articles and applicable texts. For those foreigners who study in China, we attach our attention to train the listening and speaking ability when they are in elementary level. When they reach the intermediate and advanced levels, we will center on the reading and writing capability.

All in all, the parts above discuss the existing problems in Chinese teaching in Germany as well as some teaching techniques to solve the problems. The point is that we should take different measures to teach learners who are in different levels.