Nanjing 1st Middle School has opened the Confucius Class. This is the first overseas Confucius class held by middle school of Jiangsu. Journalist dialed the telephone of the teachers and students in Australian Confucius Class. Majority of the foreigners think that “Chinese culture is really interesting!”

Nanjing 1st Middle School sent Zhang Xuan, who speaks good Mandarin and is quite professional at Chinese culture, to work as a teacher in the Class.

Zhang Xuan told the journalist that at the very beginning she arrived at Australia, they spent a lot of time for advertising because nobody knew the Confucius Class.

Eva, who comes from Ballarat Grammar School of Australia, is a student of the Confucius Class. She told journalist that there have already been more than 200 students in her school learning Chinese. “We have four lessons a week. We just learnt 《Corn Poppy》 and《Jasmine Flower》this week.”

“Chinese culture is really very interesting!” said Eva. She can already speak some Chinese.

Wu Xiaomao, president of Nanjing 1st Middle School, introduced that it was welcomed to open the Confucius Class in Australia. Because there are many Chinese descendants, they always own the consciousness of “root” and hope their children can learn Chinese and understand the Chinese culture. Also, Australians are being more and more interested in Chinese. Because of the intense business relationship between Australia and China, many Australians who hope to come to open the market in China have the needs to learn Chinese, and the ones who want to travel in China also want to learn some Chinese. “In Australia, the second language is always German or French. While for the Asian languages area, Chinese also ranks behind Japanese and Korean. Our aim of opening the Confucius Class is to making Chinese becoming the main-stream foreign language in the community.” (Nanjing Morning Post)