Elderly people of Zhangjiakou learn English to better present city to foreign guests

Many elderly people in Zhangjiakou, north China's Hebei Province have committed themselves to learning English to better present the city to foreign visitors, with the city having served as one of the competition zones for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

Hou Baocun, a 74-year-old English teacher, has been teaching English to no fewer than 50,000 local residents for free for 10 years. Since Beijing and Zhangjiakou won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in 2015, Hou has seen a growing number of elderly people learning English as well as having had more and more teachers join him. “Greeting foreign friends with a simple ‘Hello’ is a way to present the image of Zhangjiakou,” Hou said.

Hou always assigned homework to his students, who have an average age of over 60, such as how to ask the number of birds in a tree and the number of apples growing on a tree in English. He always told the students to share their different answers among each other in a WeChat group, and then would reveal the answer the next day.

One of Hou’s students Zheng Guiqin, 79, who started from scratch five years ago, has since accumulated over 1,000 vocabulary words. She shouted “Snowboarding!” excitedly in front of the TV when Chinese teenage snowboarder Su Yiming claimed a historic gold medal in the Beijing 2022 men's snowboard big air.

Gao Quanmei, 57, who has been learning English for three years, said that hosting Olympics in her hometown was an opportunity of a lifetime, so she sincerely hoped to introduce all the good things in Zhangjiakou to foreign visitors in English.

Gao, who started off by learning the alphabet, is now capable of greeting, showing people the way, and introducing some local tourist attractions such as Dajingmen and Baozili in English. Gao once asked a foreign student not to cross the road when the red light was on, which surprised him. “I don’t think he would have been so surprised if a college student had asked him to do so in English,” Gao said proudly.