European Astronaut Centre European Astronaut Centre The European Astronaut Centre (EAC) (German: Europäisches Astronautenzentrum, French: Centre des astronautes européens), is an establishment of the European Space Agency and home of the European Astronaut Corps. It is near to Cologne, Germany, and is subdivided into six separate arms, these being Astronaut Training, Space Medicine, Astronaut Management, Human Exploration of the Moon as part of the Spaceship EAC initiative and Communications. It provides training facilities for European and international partner astronauts (including a neutral buoyancy pool), particularly regarding ESA hardware for the ISS such as Columbus and formerly the ATV. The overall European Astronaut Centre
Chinese as a foreign language Chinese language proficiency exam program, which tests has been taken around 100 million times (including by domestic ethnic minority candidates). Within China's Guangdong Province, Cantonese is also offered in some schools as optional or extra-curricular courses in select Chinese as a foreign language programs, although many require students to be proficient in the Mandarin first. Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. According to the Foreign Service Institute, a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks