Learning Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) is the necessary and extremely important driving force to China’s reform and opening-up policy. To foster and enhance TCFL is an effort significant of popularizing Chinese language and culture throughout the world, strengthening the friendship and mutual understanding, encouraging the economic cooperation and exchanges between China and other countries in the world, and promoting China’s influence in the international view.

Chinese is a tone language, and pronunciation in Chinese is a characteristic of words, but English is an intonation language. In Chinese classes, The Chinese word "ma" has four tones. The four tones mean four different meanings respectively, but for the English word "beautiful", no matter what kind of tone it is read, they all have the same meaning. Chinese is also syllable-timed. A syllable is basic rhythm unit, and one word for one time. Almost every syllable takes the same time, and each syllable is clear. Nevertheless, English is stress-timed; a stress is basic rhythm unit, not the syllable. The stress in English is much louder than others; the tone quality of it is complete; the duration of pronunciation is much longer. Let’s go back to our main subject. When teaching a foreigner how to learn Chinese, we should pay attention to structure, meaning, length, grammar, the nouns and the pronouns in sentence, the passive voices and active voices, the changes and repetitions, the abstract and specific, the abbreviation and addition, and so on.

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There is an old saying going in France: “C’est du chinois”, which means “Look， this is Chinese”. People always who take Chinese courses tend to say this if they come across a rather difficult thing. This expression shows that Chinese language is considered as the language which is the hardest to learn. We will show some tips relating to teaching Chinese as a foreign language, which needs Chinese learners’ attention. The first one will be shown in terms of phonology. As is known to all, Chinese language is totally different from English language, because western linguistic theories are a set of complicated and formula system, while Chinese language is a non-formula character system which holds its own distinct rule that the meaning can be shown through the form. If we make Putonghua and Chinese characters become the linguistic system, it will be the most difficult to teach Chinese in the world. In order to teach Chinese to foreign learners on Chinese classes, we should first know the difference between Chinese and English. Only in this way, can we master Chinese as a mother language.

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