Chinese Language Courses

1. Elementary Chinese

Open to students with no or little training in Chinese. Designed to develop and reinforce language skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing as it relates to everyday life situations.

The objectives are: to master the Chinese phonetic system (pinyin and tones) with satisfactory pronunciation; to understand the construction of commonly used Chinese Characters (both simplified and traditional) and learn to write them correctly; to understand and use correctly basic Chinese grammar and sentences structures; to build up essential vocabulary;

to read and write level-appropriate passages; to become acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.

2. Intermediate Chinese

Designed to consolidate the student's overall aural-oral proficiency. Focuses gradually on the written aspect of Chinese. The objectives are: to be able to obtain information from the extended conversation; to both express and expound on, in relative length, feelings and opinions on common topics; to expand vocabulary and learn to decipher the meaning of compound words; to develop reading comprehension of extended narrative, expository and simple argumentative passages; to solve non-complex textual problems with the aid of dictionaries

To write in relative length personal narratives, informational narratives, comparison and discussion of viewpoints with level-appropriate vocabulary and grammatical accuracy, as well as basic syntactical cohesion; to continue being acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.

3. Advanced Chinese

Designed to further develop proficiency in speaking and writing through readings on and discussions of socio-cultural topics relevant to today's China. Focuses on improving reading comprehension and writing skills. The objectives are: to further improve oral communicative competence by incorporating semi-formal or formal usages; to acquire vocabulary and patterns necessary for conducting semi-formal or formal discussions of socio-cultural topics.

To increase the reading speed of texts with more advanced syntax; to learn to make a context-based guess about the meaning of a new word, conduct sentence analysis and solve textual problems with the aid of dictionaries.

To write and present more fully developed narratives or reasoned and structured arguments in length; to learn to employ basic rhetoric methods; to learn to appreciate stylistic usage of the Chinese language.