NASA Astronaut Corps their home agency but trained with and serve alongside their NASA counterparts. International astronauts, Payload Specialists, and Spaceflight Participants are not considered members of the NASA Astronaut Corps. The term "Astronaut Candidate" (informally "ASCAN") refers to individuals who have been selected by NASA as candidates for the NASA Astronaut Corps and are currently undergoing a candidacy training program at the Johnson Space Center. The most recent class of Astronaut Candidates was selected in 2017 after receiving more than 18,300 applications. Upon completion of a two-year training program, they will be promoted to the rank of Astronaut. Selection as an Astronaut
Chinese as a foreign language characters already listed above. In his 1991 article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard", David Moser states that an English speaker would find the "ridiculous" writing system "unreasonably hard to learn" to the level of achieving literacy due to the large number of characters. Moser argued that he was unable to "comfortably read" a newspaper even though he knew 2,000 characters. The 17th-century Protestant theologian Elias Grebniz, said that Chinese characters were: In Gautier's novella "Fortunio", a Chinese professor from the Collège de France, when asked by the protagonist to translate a love letter suspected to be written in Chinese,