Two students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY) achieved the runner up and second runner up in Chinese Bridge Competition ‘Hanyu Qiao 2016’ in province level. They were International Relations students, namely Muhammad Iqbal batch 2013 gaining the runner up and Novella Ryani batch 2012 obtaining the second runner up, while the winner was a student of University of Gadjah Mada (UGM). The competition itself was organized by Yogyakarta Mandarin Education Coordination Board collaborating with Hanban, Confucius, UGM on Sunday (25/4) at Vocational Hall of (UGM) and raised a theme ‘My Chinese Dream, Wo De Xhong Guo Meng’.

In an interview on Monday (25/4), Iqbal told that each participant should join three competition categories which were speech, written test, as well as question and answer. “Each participants had 80-90 seconds to answer a question from the committee, so did the written test. All the competitions used Mandarin. Indeed, the participants should understand Chinese culture,” Iqbal explained.

He inserted, “The judges are Chinese so that the participants should master Mandarin and the culture because the question is dealing with Chinese culture.”

The score was 55 percent of speech, 30 percent of the written test, and 15 percent of question and answer. “On 14-15 May 2016 we will join the National level competition in Jakarta. If we win, we will have an occasion to international level that People’s Republic of China is the organizer,” he informed.

Although UMY does not have Department of Mandarin, Language Training Center of UMY provides training of Mandarin besides English, Japanese, and Arabic. Iqbal expected that students could look for an occasion of similar competitions. “Mandarin becomes one of the popular languages besides English. I wish that there would be a lot of students gaining achievements though learning facilities have not supported yet,” Iqbal hoped.