ACCRA, Nov. 5 -- More than 300 Ghanaian students on Tuesday received the Chinese Ambassador Scholarships for their proficiency in the Chinese language.

The winners included students from the Confucius Institutes in three Ghanaian universities as well as learners from basic and secondary schools.

Speaking at the awards ceremony, Chinese Ambassador to Ghana Tong Defa said that the Chinese language is becoming popular among Ghanaian students, with more and more young locals getting to know China and going global by learning Chinese.

"The purpose of establishing this scholarship is to encourage Ghanaian students to better learn Chinese language and culture and inject new vitality into the educational and cultural exchanges and cooperation between China and Ghana," Tong said.

The ambassador told the students that learning Chinese would bring them more opportunities in the future, as many of them would also become civilian ambassadors of Ghana to China and contribute to deepening the bilateral relations between the two countries.

Mary Boateng Effah, a third-year medical services and Chinese language student at the University of Ghana, felt delighted over earning the scholarship. "If you study Chinese, you get exposed to job opportunities even though you have yet to complete school," Effah said.

Another award winner, Lillian Ama Serwah Tobias, a graduate of the University of Cape Coast, said studying the Chinese language instilled in her a zeal for continuous learning.

"What I learned from Chinese is time management. You have to maintain consistent determination, because if you stop for a week, you forget everything you have learned and have to start over."

"It instilled a learning spirit in me that I always have to keep on learning, keep on moving forward, even when it is hard," Tobias added.

Three Ghanaian universities, including the University of Ghana, the University of Cape Coast and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, have established Confucius Institutes to teach Chinese language and culture.

  - Xinhua