French student Anaelle Regniel sings a Chinese song after sharing a story of her interest in traditional Chinese medicine at a recent Confucius Institute event in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"What I learned here in China was totally different from what I had learned before. Actually, I barely knew anything about it."

Later on, she moved to the internal medicine department, where she learned about filling prescriptions. Learning the properties, composition and curative effects of TCM was difficult but productive.

"Those familiar Chinese characters just turned strange in names of herbs. I recited, forgot, then recited again and I'm still reciting them. Now I'm glad that I can follow my teachers' logic when filling prescriptions at the outpatient clinic."

She started her third year of graduate studies in September, as she won a scholarship granted by the local government in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province to take the postgraduate program at the university there.

As she shared in a speech at the 2017 Confucius Institute Open Day in Beijing in September: "I will go back to France as an inheritor and communicator of traditional Chinese culture and help those in need with my knowledge and skills."

Regniel was one of the speakers at the Story Collection, an experience-sharing session of the event, in which directors of the Confucius Institute branches, Chinese language teachers, volunteers and students were invited to share their stories in Beijing.

David Kolosov, a Russian student at Tsinghua University, who hosted the session, says: "Traditional Chinese medicine is not only about curing diseases and conditioning the body but also about Chinese philosophy."