Learn Chinese With Software

论学习外语的重要On the importance of learning foreign languages

Posted by on Jul 28th, 2010 | no comments home title

TRANSLATION Hello,everybody! My name is Marco Cerini. I live in Italy, not far from Rome. I studied Chinese at the Oriental Studies Department of Rome University. Besides its language, I am very interested in China and its culture, its history and customs. Since graduating in 2007, I have deepened my knowledge about phonetics and teaching foreign languages, not only for mere academic reasons, that is, hoping my English and my Chinese would improve. Rather, I firmly believe that we, nowadays people of the 21st century, coming from any country, belonging to any nationality and speaking whatever mother tongue, do need to communicate with each other more than ever before. Many people say English has already become the lingua franca of the world, and it is therefore useless to bother learning languages other than one's own mother tongue and English. In the past, I used to think this opinion was basically correct: in the end, I live(d) in Italy, my future family's and my job's roots etc. will stay in my own country; why should I be willing to get in touch with foreigners? Only after I started comprehending the Far Eastern Universe while attending university, I realized that, along with the unceasing advance of globalization and the explosion of new technological and scientific discoveries, even such basic concepts like "boundaries" and "distance", "here on my side" and "there on your side" have lost practical meaning. I am currently talking to you from my little house in Italy ...