Indian students flock to Mandarin courses at B-schools

Mandarin has emerged as a popular course at some of the IIMs, the Economic Times reported. One of them, IIM Bangalore (IIM-B), says Indian students cannot afford to be left behind as the two countries compete in every sphere of economic activity.

The Chinese business course helps students carry out day-to-day conversations on a vocabulary base of 550 words. The teaching lays stress on pronunciation of syllables as Chinese is a tonal language and is taught through the medium of PINYIN (Romanised way of learning Chinese).

Spoken Chinese (Mandarin) was first introduced for the batch of 2011-2013 in the second year. It is a letter-grading course, where the professor uses ‘Excellent’, ‘Good’ and ‘Unsatisfactory’. Scores are added to the student's CGPA (Cumulative Grade Point Average).

Read the full report here