CCC received a memo in November 2002 from Prof. and Mrs. Benjamin Van Riper:

"Dr. Tien: Our son is a teacher. After studying the
educational materials, which were sent to the State of
Utah Department of Education for consideration
to teach Mandarin Chinese as mandated by state law,
he was inspired to write an open letter to teachers.
Please feel free to publish in your TiENSTROKES
NEWSLETTER. See attached."

A new and exciting opportunity is ready to present itself in bridging that gap between EAST and WEST and you can be an integral part of it. How would you like to be able to teach your students Mandarin-Chinese? I know you might be thinking that there is no way that you would be able to teach Mandarin-Chinese. The language is too complex to translate into English. In the past, this may have been true, but now there is TiENSTROKES! What is TiENSTROKES? A software program that makes learning Mandarin-Chinese easy and enjoyable for everyone.

Why teach our children Mandarin-Chinese? Over a billion reasons come to mind and yes we are talking about people. Why not be on the cutting edge to give this generation of students the opportunity to openly communicate with the people of China. Let our children and students have the opportunity to communicate with the people of China free of translators. Watch political and trade barriers fall as our youth learns to communicate with the people of China in their own language. It can be accomplished with TiENSTROKES.

Students take two or three years of Spanish or French and six months after their last class all they remember is how to count to ten and say hello and good-bye. Why will it be any different with Mandarin-Chinese? Because of TiENSTROKES, which is the key that unlocks the entire Mandarin-Chinese language. Students will learn to read, write, and decode the 100 most commonly used Chinese graphic characters. That beats hello or good-bye in Spanish or French.

Quick answer to that question that is going through your mind. Why won't they forget the hundred words of Mandarin-Chinese? The reason they won't forget the first 100 words, or the hundreds to follow as the program progresses, is that they need only to remember the TiENSTROKES (10 STROKES)! This is the link between English script, Internet-Chinese, and Chinese graphic characters.

Still wondering about how you will motivate your students to learn a new language, especially Chinese? Let them know that TiENSTROKES and Mandarin-Chinese is part art class! That's right. What other language do you know of where the characters of a tree actually look like a tree when you write (draw) them out using TiENSTROKES. Chinese is the most artistically creative language in the world and our students deserve the opportunity to learn it through the user-friendliest software on the market ... TiENSTROKES.