Chinese Courses

CHN201 Beginning Chinese

[3–0, 3 cr.]

This course is designed for students with no previous knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, the official language of China. It aims at providing them with spoken and written knowledge of the language at the basic survival level. At the listening/speaking level, emphasis is placed on the phonological subtleties of intonation in Chinese and how these affect meaning. At the reading/writing level, both a phonological based system (Pinyin) and a logographic system will be simultaneously adopted. This will insure that the learning process is not impaired by the more demanding aspects of written Chinese. Finally an interactive, communicative approach to teaching will be used in order for students to actively experience the language in as authentic and functional a context as possible.