40m foreigners learning Chinese
By Xin Dingding | China Daily | Updated: 2009-03-13 07:45
The Chinese language is getting increasingly popular worldwide, with as many as 40 million people now learning it as a second language, a senior education official said.
"The number of people learning Chinese now is quite beyond our expectations," Xu Lin, director of the Chinese Language Council International, told a press conference yesterday.
According to earlier reports, only about 25 million people were learning the language in 2004.
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