BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Don't foreigners turn green with envy when they think of Dashan? The charismatic Canadian speaks fluent Chinese, which has won him a place not only in the hearts of many Chinese but also on Chinese television.

But Dashan is facing more and more competition when it comes to reaping the benefits of speaking Chinese.

Take Karim Rushdy as an example. The British national worked with the Element Fresh restaurant company in Shanghai for five years. "The majority of employees at Element Fresh either spoke very little English or none at all. Only by learning to communicate with them directly was I able to understand their needs and earn their respect and loyalty," Rushdy said.

Then there is Brad Zomick from the United States, who just landed a job as business development manager for Gaopeng, a joint venture between the U.S. company Groupon and China's Tencent.

The position requires advanced Chinese, Zomick said, adding that he had an edge over the competition in part because of his relative fluency in Chinese and having spent two years in China.

"Over the course of the two years, that has allowed me to make lots of guanxi (connections) and also become quite familiar with the culture, language and business landscape," Zomick said.

POPULARITY OF CHINESE ON THE RISE

There are a lot of statistics that support the growing popularity of learning Chinese as a foreign language. Last year, 53,000 people participated in the HSK, a standardized test to assess the Chinese language proficiency of non-native speakers. In 2007, the number was 48,000.

Also, according to a Modern Language Association of America survey released last December, Chinese ranks seventh among the most studied languages on U.S. college campuses and has registered an increase of 18.2 percent in enrollments since 2006.

As of fall 2009, over 60,000 U.S. college students were studying Chinese, although the number still lagged behind that of Spanish, French or German learners, the survey said.

Heads of language institutes or Chinese departments at universities around the world have also noticed that popular interest in Chinese is rising.

"Indeed, we do show a tremendous increase in enrollments in Mandarin group classes as well as private tutorials," said Francisco Todd, foreign languages coordinator at the International Language Institute (ILI) in Washington.

Professor Rudolf Wagner from the Institute of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, said German students are also warming up to the idea of studying Chinese.

"When I first came here in the 1980s, there were 12 to 15 students who came here to study Chinese every year," he said, adding that the annual number of freshmen studying Chinese has now climbed to 80.

To cater to this growing need for learning the Chinese language and culture, China started establishing Confucius Institutes in cooperation with overseas institutions in 2005. Now, there are 322 Confucius Institutes in 96 countries, said Ma Yansheng, counselor for education and culture at the Chinese Mission to the European Union.

The latest figures from Confucius Institutes around the world also attest to the growing popularity of learning Chinese. In Mexico, the number of students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico Confucius Institute has jumped to 700 in 2010, nearly double the number when the institute was founded in 2009, said Meng Aiqun, the institute's dean.

In Russia, Ren Guangxuan, dean of the Confucius Institute at Moscow State University, said the number of students learning Chinese has ballooned to over 200 this year from mere 70 when the institute opened in 2008.

In Africa, Sa Dequan, director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Nairobi, said applications for Chinese classes rose to over 300 in 2010, compared to only 29 in 2006.

One could cite more figures which show the increase in foreigners learning Chinese, but Professor Gu Licheng, who teaches Chinese at Northwestern University in the United States, put it in a nutshell. "The trend is very clear: It is very steadily and continuously growing and growing and growing," he said.