请问. What drives you to learn Chinese?
sambil274
June 18, 2007, 08:46 AM posted in General Discussion大家好! Motivation is an integral part of everything we do, including learning Chinese. Think back a bit.... What was it that made you want to start learning Chinese in the first place? What keeps you going? Have there been any vital sources of inspiration, or maybe just words of encouragement, along the way?
I am a research student at Nankai University in Tianjin, where I am doing research on motivational factors in learning Chinese as a second/foreign language. I would love to hear your answers to these questions and start a dialogue about our desire to learn Chinese/improve our Chinese. I think it could be an encouraging dialogue. 用英文或中文皆可. 谢谢!
henning
June 18, 2007, 01:40 PMHi sambil274, Ken has asked this questions several times on his blog, e.g.: http://blog.praxislanguage.com/2007/05/06/why-are-you-learning-chinese/ http://blog.praxislanguage.com/2007/02/11/why-learn-chinese/ http://blog.praxislanguage.com/2006/12/22/your-motivations/ Have fun mining in there.
man2toe
June 19, 2007, 05:17 AMWhat happened to henning's post?
henning
June 19, 2007, 06:40 AMHm, maybe promoting Ken's excellent blog is agains the Comments Policy?
henning
June 19, 2007, 09:03 AMIt reappeared :) My last post can be deleted then.
sambil274
June 20, 2007, 05:37 AMThank you very much henning for the link! It is most helpful.
tianfeng
June 20, 2007, 11:58 AMHistory, traveling and a girl. I really started learning Chinese to talk to this girls parents who didn't speak English but after we broke up I still really enjoyed the learning and kept it up through university. I also learned Spanish and Japanese for girls. Cantonese is probably the only language that I don't have a girl motive attached. It is just so when I go out with my friends in HK I can participate without the need of a translator.
sambil274
June 18, 2007, 09:11 AMBTW, this is an open-ended question, no right or wrong answers. OK, I'll start us off.... Probably one of my biggest motivations to learn Chinese was to give myself a bit of a challenge after I had graduated from college. I was getting a little too comfortable in my provincial life in Kansas and needed to break out, so I started learning Chinese and then moved to China. After that I realized that I enjoyed learning Chinese, but more than that, probably liked makiing observations about the world around me, trying to figure it out, and found that if I really want to understand what is going on about me, then I need to hear it from the people around me, and that would require better Chinese. Those have been examples of some important motivators in my journey learning Chinese.