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 (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is Several major difficulties stand out: While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses "hanzi", or Chinese characters, as its writing system. The "Kangxi dictionary" contains 47,035 characters (). However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (), promulgated in People's Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese () lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500