Portuguese Professor: Learning Chinese has brought me closer to China, a great country

2021/05/08

Joao Veloso, Foreign Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Porto, Portugal, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Porto.

Image courtesy of Confucius Institute, University of Porto, Portugal

This year, I was lucky enough to start learning Chinese. Although it's only been a few months, learning this language has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life, both personally and professionally. I am a linguist and a professor of linguistics at the University of Porto in Portugal. Throughout my career, I have mainly studied my mother tongue, Portuguese and other Latin-based languages. Being the director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Porto, working with the Confucius Institute and working here, has been one of the most meaningful experiences in my career and personal life, and one of the main reasons that prompted me to enroll in the Chinese language program. But there are other reasons.丨learn Chinese word年  nián  year

For a long time, I have a special respect for Chinese culture. When I was young, I had many Macanese friends. I was always surrounded by Chinese characters, which attracted me by their beauty and mystery. I like Oriental martial arts, often read books with Chinese background, love to eat Chinese food, also often listen to Chinese music...... Later, I had the opportunity to visit many cities in China, which gave me a firsthand, deeper understanding and appreciation of a country I already loved. For both personal and professional reasons, I began to learn Chinese, a language so different from any I had ever known, a wish that has finally come true in the last few months.

As we all know, if you want to understand a country, a people and a culture, you must know its language code. The thoughts, feelings, communication, debate and education of a nation and nation are transmitted through language codes. This is how I took my first step in learning Chinese at the Confucius Institute at the University of Porto, and as I said, this experience has exceeded all my initial expectations.

My Chinese lessons were great, and learning a language like Chinese has proven to be intellectually stimulating, cognitively challenging, reinforcement learning, and a great pleasure. I am convinced that learning the language and having more direct access to Chinese literature, information and the Chinese world will bring me closer and closer to China, a great country that respects its history, builds its present and stores wisdom for its future.

Chinese Mandarin and Portuguese are widely used in the world. Many Chinese people learn Portuguese in China, Portugal and other Portuguese-speaking countries. For a long time, Portuguese people have not shown much interest in the study of Chinese language and Chinese history, literature and culture, nor have they shown much interest in modern China, perhaps because there are relatively few opportunities to learn Chinese in Portugal. I'm very pleased that this is changing. Today, more and more Portuguese universities, secondary schools and other institutions have begun to offer Chinese courses, while many Portuguese people have begun to establish close ties and friendships with China.

As I said before, verbal communication is the first step to sharing many other valuable values. The more we know and learn Chinese, the more we know about this friendly country. I am very happy to be able to contribute to the growth in the number of people learning these two languages and to be a part of it. It has been the good fortune of my life. While I am pleased with the increase in the number and quality of Portuguese language experts in China, I also very strongly and sincerely hope that the number of Portuguese Sinologists will increase year by year. I am pleased to link the above reasons with the United Nations Chinese Language Day. The fact that the United Nations, an organization that enables all nations to maintain peace and understanding among nations under equal conditions, has chosen Chinese as one of its official languages is testimony to the value of this language in itself and to China's irreplaceable role in world development. In BeihaiMandarin, you can learn formal Chinese course HSK, and there is a lot of information about China.