An investigation indicates that students who are learning Chinese Mandarin from different language backgrounds will choose different selective courses to meet their different language capability requirements. This investigation helps us to learn deeper about the demands of students so that we can design more practical teaching plans for them to learn Chinese Mandarin better.

After having a certain language application capability, the requirements of students will have some changes in learning Chinese Mandarin. An investigation shows that the purposes of selecting courses are different from students to students. Why does this situation happen?

Japanese and Korean students for Chinese culture circle have the background of using Chinese characters, therefore, whey they are learning Chinese Mandarin will not select Chinese character course, which is also the known truth and has been proved in the investigation among 300 students who are learning Mandarin in China.

But this is only a phenomenon and the impression we got from this phenomenon is also general and not specific enough. In order to learn about the requirements of students for capability and knowledge, we should further learn the considerations of Japanese and Korean students when they are making the decision of selecting or giving up courses. For the statements about situation of selecting courses and the purposes of selecting courses in the investigation among these students who are learning Chinese Mandarin can be taken as the comparative materials.

Japanese and Korean students who have selected Chinese character course introduced their purpose of selecting courses in the questionnaire like this: “to learn about Chinese characters”; “to know the origin or history of Chinese characters”. While students from European, American and African areas who are learning Mandarin in China said that they selected Chinese character course for learning how to write and memorizing Chinese characters.

Obviously, the former emphasizes on the acquisition for knowledge, while the later focuses on the cultivation for capability. These two different statements from two learner groups reflect the different requirements of learners who have different foundations or different capability levels when they are learning Chinese Mandarin.

According to a questionnaire investigation result about Chinese teaching made in 1998, the accuracy rate of Japanese and Korean students in doing the choice questions about recognizing and judging the basic characteristics of Chinese characters is much lower than the one of students from Western Asian and European areas.

We can associate this with the phenomenon that the native Chinese people can recognize and write Chinese characters as long as he is not illiterate person, but he still needs to specially learn about the relevant knowledge of Chinese characters. As for whether students need to specially learn this part or not when they are learning Chinese Mandarin, experts have different attitudes.

Regardless of the different characteristics between Eastern and Western people in thinking and acquisition, we may probably get this impression from the questionnaire: in the beginning period of learning Chinese Mandarin, the learners mainly need to get perceptual knowledge and application capability.

After having this kind of capability, some students who are interested in or have clear target on learning Chinese Mandarin will require learning to analyze and further get the conceptual knowledge about language laws. Furthermore, they will expect to make more efforts on the progress of capability in the guidance of the knowledge and acquisition.

However, there are also some students will be satisfied with the capability they already have or no more request to learning Chinese Mandarin deeper because of some objective reasons or limitations. The above situation of selecting courses is just a typical example for this.