My Chinese Dream come true in Hungary
Zsuzsanna Karsai is the first European to be recruited by the Confucius Institute among graduates of the master’s program on teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages, and she’s now teaching Chinese in Budapest.
“It’s not an easy test,” Karsai says about the exam she took in Beijing in June. “You have to give a demonstration class, explaining some grammar points and Chinese culture.”
For the past two years, Karsai has studied at Fudan University in Shanghai with Chinese students, learning to teach Chinese to foreign speakers.
“It’s difficult for a foreigner to study a major in Chinese. But the teachers have taught us very well, and I really love it there,” says Karsai, who is among 15 international students in her class.
The bond between Karsai and Chinese started when she was still a little girl and received a gift from her mother.
It was a ruler with a picture of the Monkey King, a protagonist in the Chinese classical novel The Journey to the West, and some Chinese characters.
“I asked myself: ‘Is that another language? How mysterious!’” Karsai recalls of her first encounter with Chinese.
She later became a fan of Chinese martial arts through Jackie Chan’s kung fu movies. But whenever she told her parents that she wanted to learn Chinese, they just smiled.
In her hometown of Oroshaza, a small city in southeastern Hungary, there were neither Chinese teachers nor anyone who knew the Chinese language in the 1990s.
“But I never gave up on that dream. Sometimes I spoke to the Monkey King, saying I wished I could learn Chinese and visit China one day,” says Karsai, who realized her dream in 2005 when she went to study at the Chinese department of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
During her first year in university, Karsai was given a Chinese name — Ruyi — which means “as one’s wish”.
Many people feel that learning Chinese characters is difficult, but Karsai found them beautiful.
She spent hours practicing writing them on paper and never tired of doing so.
She also participates in Chinese Bridge, a Chinese proficiency competition for foreign college students all over the world. She won third place in Hungary in 2008.
The same year, she went to Shandong Normal University as an exchange student on a government scholarship.
Before she graduated from university, Karsai found a job teaching Chinese to students from first to eighth grades at the Hungarian-Chinese Bilingual School in Budapest in 2011.
Karsai also worked with Chinese teachers on writing Hungarian-Chinese bilingual textbooks.
Working as a teacher made Karsai realize she needed more training in teaching Chinese so she came to China again in 2014.
“From a girl with a ruler to a Chinese teacher, I have realized my dream. I think there will be more people wanting to learn Chinese in Hungary, and I will help them to realize their dream,” Karsai wrote in her graduation reflection at Fudan University.