In September 2019, Zhanar Toktarbay (first left, second row), as a representative of outstanding Kazakh students, takes a photo with visiting President Tokayev (middle) in Beijing.

I am Zhanar Toktarbay from Kazakhstan. Currently, I am teaching Chinese at McGill College in Canada. I studied in a number of countries including China, the United States and Iran. Aside from my native Kazakh, I am fluent in Chinese, English, Russian and Persian.

I attended schools and lived in Xinjiang and Northeast China as a child. That's when I formed an unbreakable bond with the Chinese language.

After graduating from university in 2005, I taught Chinese at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics & Strategic Research (KIMEP) and Kazakh-British Technical University for several years. Chinese is one of the world's most challenging languages. Speaking the language doesn't mean you know how to teach it. I was the school's youngest instructor at the time. Furthermore, there were few books or studies on teaching Chinese to native Russian and Kazakh speakers. So I learned how to teach from teaching my students. I worked hard and, over time, my students improved their pronunciation and became more eager to learn Chinese. And I have progressed from a novice to a seasoned Chinese teacher.