Introduction
Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language that developed in the 10th century BC in East Asia and it is now spoken in 9 different countries and territories in Asia, but also around the globe. Chinese is a native language for over 900 million people, being an official language in 6 countries. Basically, 14.6% of the world’s population speaks this language. That’s why learning Chinese is definitely a smart choice. Fashioned by the colonial British in the manner of a grand European capital—yet now set in one of the poorest and most overpopulated regions of India—Kolkata has grown into a city of sharp contrasts and contradictions. Kolkata has had to assimilate strong European influences and overcome the limitations of its colonial legacy in order to find its own unique identity. In the process it created an amalgam of East and West that found its expression in the life and works of the 19th-century Bengali elite and its most noteworthy figure, the poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore.
Learning a new language makes you more conscious of the nuts and bolts of your own language. Terms such as vocabulary, grammar, conjugation, comprehension, idioms and sentence structure become everyday phrases, whereas your own language is probably absorbed more intuitively. Learning a new language also makes you a better listener as you are used to having to interpret meaning and judge nuances. In this blog, we’ll share some of the best places to learn Chinese in Kolkata:
