Merchants take notes while learning Spanish at Yiwu International Trade Market on May 12. [Photo by Wu Fengyu for Tide News]

The Yiwu International Trade Market launched its third foreign language morning training session on May 12. This session focuses on Spanish, with over 200 merchants participating in Yiwu, Zhejiang province.

This is the first time Spanish has been introduced in the morning sessions, in response to evolving international trade needs. The 20-lesson course runs through June 6.

The addition of Spanish further strengthens the market's multilingual training, offering its 75,000 merchants a chance to grow their global business and boost trade.

In the first quarter of 2025, Yiwu's trade with Latin America and the European Union reached 27.31 billion yuan ($3.79 billion) and 16.36 billion yuan, respectively, up 14.1 percent and 16.5 percent year-on-year. 

On March 5, this year's first English training session commenced to help merchants communicate with European and American markets. On April 7, Arabic courses started to support trade with the Middle East.

According to Zhejiang China Commodities City Group, the organizer of the language training, this program has been running for 19 years and has trained over 500,000 market participants to date. The program helps merchants master one or even multiple foreign languages, with all courses free for merchants at the market.

This year's schedule includes 140 lessons and will also be conducted in District 4 of the market.