China is the second largest economy in the world and one of the largest trading partners of the United States. International businesses prefer to hire people who speak more than one language. China has become a huge market, and business leaders are looking for people who can speak Chinese and operate successfully in a Chinese cultural context. China is one of the world's oldest and richest continuous cultures, over 5,000 years old! One fifth of the planet speaks Chinese.  Mandarin Chinese is the mother tongue of over 873 million people, making it the most widely spoken first language in the world.

The study of the Chinese language opens the way to different important fields such as Chinese politics, economy, history and archeology. But to study Chinese means to study a culture, a people.  

Chinese has a relatively uncomplicated grammar. Unlike French, German or English, Chinese has no verb conjugation (no need to memorize verb tenses!) and no noun declension (e.g., gender and number distinctions). The basic word order of Chinese is subject — verb — object, exactly as in English.