NIU students are not the only ones learning Chinese on campus.

Meeting every Sunday afternoon in Wirtz Hall are children from local areas who learn Mandarin Chinese from volunteer teachers.

The program was started by Prof. Lan Li of the Family, Consumer and Nutrional Sciences Department back in September 2007.

Prof. Li could not be reached, but the program’s treasurer, Julia Niu, explained that there had been great interest from Chinese-American families in the area to have such a program started.

“A lot of Chinese families didn’t want to travel as far as Naperville for teaching Chinese to our kids so we just said, ‘Why don’t we have our own school here?'” Niu said.

Today, the program is open to all and has 27 students from areas such as DeKalb, Sycamore, Rochelle and Rockford. The students range in age from three years old to mid-teens.

Lessons are divided up into four different levels: advanced, intermediate, beginner and a new basic course started this semester for people with no experience with the Chinese language.

Mengqiao Xu is a doctoral student in educational technology at NIU and teaches the intermediate level in the program. She has found that teaching a complex language to children can be easy at times, but with some difficulty.

“Some of them have been easy to teach, but you always have difficulty with teaching some of them because some of them don’t have the family support at home like the kids with American families,” Xu said.

For some of the students, their answers for why they are taking the lessons were “because my parents made me.”

“If I had a choice I wouldn’t take it because I remember [what I learn], but then I just forget it,” said 10-year-old Angelina Ye. “There’s really no point in doing it for me.”

The parents, however, insist their children learn the language for the sake of their heritage and communication with relatives in China.

“As Chinese parents, my husband and I want [our son] to learn to communicate better with us and learn from tradition,” said Zhen Wu, a chemist with one child in the program.

With the new basic level of Chinese class for those without any experience in the language, the teacher, Charlene Thompson, has found it to be going better than expected and said how significant the language is becoming today.

“With the globalization and fast development of China to where it’s become the center of attention, more and more people are wanting to get to know the Chinese culture and language,” Thompson said.