More put learning Chinese to test in European Union

More people in European Union countries have taken Chinese-language proficiency tests in recent years, an official at Hanban - the headquarters of the Confucius Institutes - said on Thursday.

"The EU is expected to be the largest market following the Republic of Korea, Japan and Singapore," Hu Zhiping, deputy director-general of Hanban, told China Daily on the sidelines of a meeting at Dalian University of Foreign Languages in Liaoning province.

The testing center in Madrid, the Spanish capital, said the annual number of candidates taking two Chinese-language tests had risen from 163 in 2009 to 3,474 in 2013.