It should be understood by language learners who are puzzled about how to learn Mandarin that there is a large amount of the melancholy postgraduate students of the Beijing University, Tsinghua Univeristy and the People’s University who could not find jobs fitting in with their specialties and felt annoyed at not being able to make their own contributions to the popularization of Chinese language for the nation.
These students are quite pitiable since they could be the best of the best for their entrance of the Top three Chinese universities, then it is inscrutable for language learners to learn to speak Chinese in China for the reason of their overburdening with such illusory halos at the expenses of their own bright future. It is understandable for people in qualified Mandarin program to find the reports on the all the medias capable of expressing information, namely the newspapers, TV, broadcasts, magazines, the internet, etc. that are overspreading the Mandarin fever with their specific data. Such as that the number of people learning Chinese had exceeded 30millions or 0.1 billion people while there is sore need for the TCFL teachers, and the ratio of the students and teachers in TCFL had reached 1:1000.
A lot of people would be choked up with emotions when they get to know these figures, since the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language seems to be a promising, honorable, and a perfect working opportunity, therefore, it is not difficult to find by friends who are taking free Chinese lessons in China that a large number of people started to take part in the entrance exams for the postgraduate schools.
They had registered for the professions of linguistics in Chinese school in China, department of Chinese language and literature, the postgraduate school of the international Chinese language teaching, some of them failed for the first year, they took the second, and so on, when they finally got qualified and been admitted into the postgraduate school, they learn for a while, and have internships for a while before they become unemployed after graduation.
For students to learn Mandarin in China, according to their recalling, the largest part they had learned was the linguistic theories, such as the Linguistics of Bloomfield, the theories of linguists Humboldt and Saussure, as well as the French and Germanic schools of linguistics, which had taken up much energy and are time-consuming, while proved to be irrelevant with teaching and far enough away from pursuing the linguistics researches.
And second mostly-elaborated subject learned from the postgraduate schools is the Chinese grammar, since students have to study and memorize the theories of the different masters, such as those of Zhu Dexi, Xing Fuyi, Wang Li, Lv Shuxiang, etc., however, It’s noticeable for students to learn Chinese in China that while those theories being explained to the students, the professors would not make them in the most concise form, students may be fainted upon hearing half an hours’ dwelling on the simple “bei” construction.
The style of training TCFL students in the same way as the Chinese majors must have had tortured a lot of students to learn Chinese, since many of them are going to get unemployed, or to apply for volunteers, or to get enrolled in a Ph.D. program after graduation.
Figures have it that the hardest postgraduate major in job hunting is the TCFL, one of the students who had received the undergraduate education at the People’s University had learned the TCFL postgraduate courses in the Beijing University had been hanging around to look for jobs since her graduation.
Since in her opinion, the entering of the colleges and universities would require Ph.D. graduates, the working in the language training centers are for those undergraduate students, the diverting of her profession would be unpredictable, the entering to the primary or middle public schools requires the teacher certification, the teaching of Chinese are left for the freshmen of the normal universities, the teaching of English would hardly meet her self-identification, the working as secretaries in companies would not be promising, etc.
The only way out seems to get enrolled into the preparations for the Ph.D. degree, however, the examination for the qualifications of the Chinese language teachers about to be carried out by NOCFL (China National Office for teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language) must attract more youth to take part in this career to teach people ready to study in China, since it should be made clear that the foreigners coming to study Chinese in China does not exceed 0.2 million per year, while at the other hand, going abroad is also a hard journey since only five thousand teachers are selected out from more than hundreds of thousands of candidates to teach Chinese language abroad.