National Taiwan University

This course serves as a general introduction to psycholinguistics. It covers basic areas such as neurolinguistics, speech perception, word recognition, lexical ambiguity, sentence comprehension, language acquisition, and production. Prerequisite: Students must have completed the course, Introduction to Linguistics.

The literary material for this course is ancient, medieval, and modern oral poems, including Beowulf, English and Scottish ballads, Middle and Modern English sayings, contemporary US spoken word poets (poetry slam poets), and translations from the world's greatest oral poems and laws. Each student constructs a virtual (oral) book of poetry. The methodology of this course is partly performative: each class meeting consists of an operational discussion of orality--learning and jamming oral poems—as well as a theoretical discussion of orality. In other words, students will read theories of orality and ethnopoetics for the sake of putting them into practice and testing them as performance, and students perform as a way to understand the ahistorical processes of orality, so often misrecognized in modernity. Guest speakers from other faculties are invited to educate students on the brain and memory; the relationship of music, voice, and text; and performance. Individually and as a group we shall build a repertoire, a living corpus of intangible culture. Students will also watch and describe performances of oral poetry from around the world, including the South African ibongi, the Argentine payador, and American poetry slams. The theoretical foundations of this course include cognitive approaches to literature, oral theory, and ethnopoetics. Subthemes include memory and participatory knowledge.

Statistical learning is the process of extracting regularities from data using statistical models with the goal of finding a predictive function based on existing data to be able to make prediction on unseen data of similar type. The course introduces the concepts and analytical tools of statistical learning, it emphasizes “learning by doing“ with the use of R programming language to perform analysis on empirical data. The first part of the course starts with a refresher on the fundamentals of statistics—mean, variance, distribution, probabilities—before proceeding to more specialized topics. The first part of this course also gives a gentle introduction to R programming, during which issues of dimensionality and balance are discussed with their diagnostic and preprocessing tasks implemented in R. The second part of the course introduces families of binary, penalized, discriminant, and mixture models, along with performance evaluation metrics. The course concludes with the trendy topic on text mining, that is, drawing inference from text data.

This course provides the basic tools and knowledge needed to design optical systems. At the end of the course, students will be able to take system requirements, select possible components and approaches, create candidate designs, and analyze and optimize their performance. Students learn and utilize standard optical design tools, particularly ray-tracing, as well as learning how to create custom system models with wave, polarization, or Gaussian-beam optical modeling. The course objectives include basic design techniques for ray optics; wave optics in isotopic media; design concepts for optical instruments (microscope, telescope, camera lenses); aberration in optical system (real world problems); how to select optical components (lenses, fibers, optical source and detectors); and optical CAD tools discussion (ZEMAX education version).

This course examines the various ways in which the multinational enterprises arrange their business activities around the world to pursue the highest profits after tax. The course introduces the basic principles of tax planning and the basic structure of international taxation. Topics include residence-based taxation, source-based taxation, tax treaties, thin capitalization rules, deductibility of expenses, controlled foreign corporation rules, rules regarding foreign trust and investment fund, and transfer pricing. Text: H. Gustafson et al., Taxation of International Transactions. Assessment: class participation (30%), midterm exam (35%), final exam (35%).

This course introduces pre-Qin Taoist philosophy, and mainly explains the important concepts and issues of pre-Qin Taoist philosophy through study, discussion, and teacher explanation. This course consists of two units with equal emphasis: Laozi and Zhuangzi. In terms of form, the course focuses on methods of argumentation and strategies for meaning-making in philosophical writings. In terms of content, it discusses the social value of Taoist philosophy and views on interpersonal interaction, of which language and communication are important themes.

The Introduction to Environmental History is characterized by its depth of time and space. From the Pleistocene of about 2.5 million years ago to 11,000 years ago, the course traces back to Anthropocene from the 18th century to the present. The course not only discusses the evolution of homo sapiens, but also how the interaction between the species and the environment creates the so-called "civilization". There is also discussion on how these "civilized" Homo sapiens descend in the eighteenth century Industrialization, and even the establishment of capitalism, which drastically changed the Earth's environment, so that the current geologists into whether or not to "human world" included in the formal geological age of the debate. In the context of archeology and historical geography, the Introduction to Environmental History invites fellow students to reflect on the past of man as a species, and to think about whether or not we need - or need - a common future in the end.

This engineering mathematics course covers matrices and gaussian elimination, vector spaces, orthogonality, determinants, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and positive definite matrices.

The course provides an understanding of the structure of Chinese characters and radicals. It strengthens student ability of remembering form, pronunciation and meaning of Chinese characters. The course is taught mainly in Chinese, and supportively in English.

This course teaches students Japanese from higher beginner. Topics: sentences with basic grammar used in daily conversation; vocabulary including noun, verb, adjective, and adverbs. Also, to improve students' listening and oral skill, the course instructor plays and explains popular Japanese songs or short film clips. The second semester of first-year elementary Japanese. Focused on abilities of reading, speaking and listening. This course starts from Lesson 8 and ends with Lesson 16. There is a midterm, a final exam and quizzes once a week. Homework includes translation, compositions and listening exercises.