Forty-four students from an international trilingual school in Warsaw, Poland, embarked on a journey that stretched over 8,000 kilometers — a twenty-hour flight across sky and sea to the mountainous heart of China: Chongqing.
As the only school in Poland offering Chinese language courses from kindergarten through secondary school, providing students with an immersive language environment has always been Principal Anna's guiding vision.
However, it's not easy for Polish children to master Chinese, a tonal language. For most speakers of European languages, Anna noted, mispronunciation or a noticeable accent during communication doesn't influence understanding in most cases. But in the context of Chinese, things can be quite different.
Anna noted that because of these distinctions, children learning Chinese need to engage more deeply with sounds and tones, which, to some extent, enhances their musical perception. Since students at the school are typically required to learn three different languages simultaneously, they must associate three separate words with the same object—an exercise that fosters abstract thinking skills.
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