Students show Chinese proficiency

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Temujin Nusantara Iqbal, a first-year student of Maranatha University of Bandung, West Java, quickly pressed the buzzer on his desk every time a juror read out grammatical questions in Mandarin.

He and his teammates, David Steven and Symphoni, astonishingly answered almost all the questions in the final round of the 9th Chinese Language Competition for the basic level, held on Saturday at the School of Humanities, University of Indonesia (UI).

His team won the competition, organized by the students of the Chinese literature, after beating teams from Petra University, Widya Kartika University, both from Surabaya, and the host university, UI.

Meanwhile, in the intermediate and advanced levels, the winners were Petra University and Maranata University respectively.

"We organized the competition to see how far students of Chinese literature have mastered the Chinese language. And we also would like to strengthen the relationship between students who are studying Chinese," Etsy Tia Kartika, spokesperson of the organizing committee told The Jakarta Post.

Besides organizing competitions for all levels of Chinese language, the committee also held speech, storytelling, and karaoke competitions.

Etsy said the organizer was surprised by the enthusiasm shown by the students to participate in the competition.

"The language competition participants came from the universities that we invited. But for speech, storytelling and karaoke, we only set a quota of 15 participants for each competition. But more than 20 registered for each competition," she said.

Iwan Lee, one of the jurors at the competition, said that this was heartening because it showed how Mandarin has become popular in the country.

"Chinese has become the second most popular language after English in the world. The fact that many students are mastering the language proves that this trend has also infected Indonesia," he said.

However, Joanne Liu of Taiwan said that Indonesian students should improve their Mandarin speaking capability as soon as possible to allow them to interact with foreigners who speak the language.

"Most of them are good, but that's not enough. They have to speak the language more often because Indonesians are actually late in learning the language. Malaysians and Singaporeans already mastered the language more than 10 years ago," she said.