Characters for the world

A writing challenge

Li Hongfei has spent almost five years in Thailand teaching Chinese first to Thai-Chinese pupils and later to college students.

According to a Guangming Daily report from 2021, more than 1 million Thai students were learning Chinese at school, and China has sent in excess of 20,000 volunteers to teach in over 1,000 Thai schools since 2003.

Li Hongfei became one of those volunteers in 2019 and is now a lecturer of China studies at the Pridi Banomyong International College of Thammasat University in Bangkok.

Both in and out of class, he seizes the growing interest of young Thais in Chinese celebrities, costume dramas, traditional clothing like hanfu and the country's cuisine, hotpot in particular, to encourage students to speak more.

As a foreign language teacher in Thailand, his work centers on creating an immersive environment for his students, many of whom will come to China as exchange students in the third year of college, to study Chinese, while minimizing the use of Thai or English.

Li Hongfei says that he has observed a growth in students consulting him and his colleagues about potential opportunities to study in China, and the college he works for has been making more effort to train local Chinese language teachers.

However, both Liao and Li Hongfei find written language a major challenge for their students. As an alternative, some prefer typing or using pinyin instead of learning to write the characters themselves, which coincides with the universal debate on whether it's still necessary to master handwriting in the digital era.

German engineer Volker Mueller started to work in Chongqing in the late 1980s.