Chengdu entrepreneur Li Shengcheng wants to teach the world Chinese with his innovative language-learning software

----By Mark Godfrey

Learning Chinese isn't always fun. But Li Shengcheng is trying to take some of the sometimes literal pain out of tones and the unending bank of characters every student of Chinese student knows he'll need just to be able to read the headlines of the People's Daily every morning.

The company Li established in 2003, Chengdu-based Outsourcing Soft, has devised a software programme which uses the computer keyboard and mouse instead of a teacher and a blackboard to teach Chinese. The software, titled Let's Learn Chinese, "has been taking a technical lead in the Chinese language education software for the aliens." That's how a company brochure translated into over two dozen languages reads.

If that sounds like a mouthful from a language software producer, get the specifications of Let's Learn Chinese, the company's leading product. The company's edge is in "pronunciation rectification" and "intelligent pronunciation synthesisation," according to the booklet which comes with each box.

The choice of language makes more sense when you meet Li, a shy, earnest Sichuanese software maker with a permanent smile. The academic-looking 43-year-old has come up with software that allows students to recite words, the pronunciation of which is corrected by the software until it the student gets each word or phrase right. That Li is obsessive about words and their meaning is obvious from the delight he takes in rubbing the cursor over the English translations of Chinese words the Let's Learn Chinese software comes up with. Though he speaks only rudimentary English himself, his brochures came straight out of the English and Chinese books on linguistics he studied while designing the Let's Learn Chinese software. Students can also draw characters by moving their cursor and colouring in characters in blue. "It's got something for beginners and advanced," explains Li.

The software technicians who refine and test the software make up 60 percent of a staff of 150 at Outsourcing Soft. Chengdu-born Li, who invented the software, is cashing in on the rest of the world's eagerness to learn Chinese. "More than 30 million people in the world are learning Chinese as a foreign language," he says. He picked that figure up from the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (NOTCFL) at the first-ever World Chinese Conference in Beijing last autumn.

More than 2,500 universities in 100 countries now teach Chinese as a foreign language.

Little wonder, then, that his company's software sales doubled from RMB5 million to RMB10 million (?480,000-970,000) in 2005. That figure doubled again to RMB20 million last year. Outsourcing Soft's exports in 2006 totalled ?700,000, Li says. "Most of the total sales came from Let's Learn Chinese."

In demand

Outsourcing Soft, a 160-staff firm in Chengdu's Tianfu Software Park, may be proof China can talk the talk - literally and figuratively - on innovation. Certainly the company's stall was one of the busiest at the recent EU-China Partnerariat in Chengdu. Plonked amid a row of stalls offering European business everything from fibre-optic cables to pork rinds, the Outsourcing Soft stall attracted a steady line of businesspeople speaking several European languages standing in line to speak with Li.

Spanish, French and German editions of Let's Learn Chinese were moving particularly fast off the display shelves, each box priced at RMB400. The software, designed for Windows, loads on to a PC from a CD-ROM or USB drive, packaged with a manual in smart boxes labelled in 25 different languages at Outsourcing Soft's Chengdu premises.

This writer got the last box of English software at the stall. Outsourcing Soft staff sat at a bank of computers to demonstrate the software's features. Little pictures demonstrate how the tongue ought to roll to get the right sound. "All the phrases are professionally dubbed," boasts Li, crouching over one of his staff who operates the computer. "We hired professional linguists." Language-learning software may be the future, but for now Outsourcing Soft its R&D efforts supplement the meat-and-potatoes software outsourcing services the company set out doing in 2003. From the company's premises on in balmy Chengdu's silicon quarter, Outsourcing Soft staff go on-site to implement and repair software at the local offices of large corporations like Huawei, IBM and UT Starcom. Outsourcing Soft also sells logistics management software and software for China's police stations.

But Li would prefer developing his own software to fixing others'. Chengdu has many software subcontractors after all, as Li is quick to acknowledge. Using the few words of English at his disposal, Li says he was "very happy" when the Chengdu municipal government in 2005 awarded Let's Learn Chinese the distinction of Excellent Software Product. In August 2006 the firm received a grant from China's National Innovation Fund, which helped add Japanese, Korean, Italian and Spanish editions to the company's line-up of products.

Chinese-language-learning software is obviously more exciting for local officials, who want the city to earn a name for itself as a kind of Chinese Bangalore - a base for high-value software engineering. Yet while Li has product, he lacks distribution channels. So far, North America and Singapore have proven the top markets for Let's Speak Chinese. Now he's seeking agents to distribute the software in Europe. "We have French, German and Italian editions now. бн We'd also like EU-based partners for production and sales of software products and software outsourcing services."

Marketing and distribution are clearly Li's weak spots, and he is vague when pressed for details of precise distribution channels and earnings. "Overseas we're setting up a marketing network to reach North America, the EU and Russia as well as Japan and Korea. These are all developed economies." That suggests that Outsourcing Soft's marketing efforts will be confined to higher-value markets. South Korea, Japan and France, Li points out, boast the highest numbers of learners of Chinese as a foreign language in the world, judging from the number of participants in the Chinese language proficiency test run by NOTCFL. There will be no Hindi or Indonesian version of the software, he concedes.

To tap local populations of expatriates, Li is planning sales through a "nationwide network of chain stores" but has not yet appointed agents or distributors. "They will be supplemented by an online sales channel that reaches customers in China," he promises.

Big-time competition

Let's Learn Chinese is not alone in the market. Several domestic and foreign education companies have developed similar products. A stroll in the Xinhua bookstore in Xidan, Beijing's largest shop for academic books, offers the browser a choice of a dozen multimedia kits by local players like the Foreign Language Press and foreign publishing houses like Berlitz and Hodder & Stoughton. But few are software packages; most are audio-visual learning aids combining a book and CD.

There's money to be made coming up with ways of taking the hassle out of learning, says Li. At last year's World Chinese Conference in Beijing, he met a South African media company that runs Let's Learn Chinese-style TV shows. A Chengdu-based Indian acquaintance gave him a copy of political weekly magazine India Today which advertised special issues with a Chinese learning supplement taped to the front cover of each magazine.

If Chengdu has an equivalent of Infosys, the Indian outsourcing giant, it may Li Shengcheng's Outsourcing Soft. And if the city seeks a hometown hero to match the legendary Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, it may be mild-manner Li. The software maker is getting ready for a whistle-stop tour of European capitals this summer, seeking customers and distributors for Let's Learn Chinese and software outsourcing for his programmers back in Chengdu.

Certainly Chengdu has the infrastructure that Murthy and any other ambitious tech-company boss would be proud of. For Chengdu, Outsourcing Soft is the future. Several industrial parks sporting buildings in various shades of plate glass and smart cladding and trellises offer a vision of a clean industrial base for the capital of Sichuan. The city is very proud of its super-modern software park, nods Li, who rattles off local government data with ease. "Chengdu's software sales revenue reached RMB15 billion in 2006," he says. "The local software industry exported US$200 million (RMB1.55 billion; 149 million) in 2006 бн and employed 100,000 staff." The Chengdu government since 2003 has boasted an annual software outsourcing summit, designed to draw business to over 500 software enterprises and over 1000 software products certified by the local government.

As he hands over a box of Let's Learn Chinese, it's clear that Li is pleased as punch with his patented product. He points again to a sentence in the company brochure. His own English may be limited, but Li seems to know the content of the company's brochures intimately. "With beautiful and clear operating interfaces and buttons that are easy and convenient to use, each part is designed with the user in mind." Li, or anyone who can take the pain out of the four tones and many thousands of characters, of the Chinese language, deserves a listen.