Chinese

This elementary Chinese course is for beginners with no previous knowledge of the language. It aims to introduce Chinese language and culture through practical use of the language to students. The learning activities develop students’ listening, speaking, reading and writing skills and gradually build up students’ confidence in using Putonghua for daily communication. In order to establish a solid foundation for long-term study, the learning of Chinese characters is an essential part of this course.

This course is directed towards those who have taken Advanced High Chinese I of the NTU Chinese Language Course for International Students. This course provides opportunities for students to read two news reports per week as well as short classical Chinese, poetry, and prose. 

In this course, students are taught how to critically read, appreciate and analyze texts in classical Chinese in their specific historical, literary and philosophical contexts. Translating the original texts into modern Chinese is an integral part of the course. This is a compulsory course for students majoring in Chinese Studies. Readings include representative works of prose and rhyme-prose from the pre-Qin to the Qing period. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

The course helps students from diverse backgrounds to understand modern China and its historical roots. Focusing on topical aspects of China's past and history, this course provides a bird's-eye view of China's modern transformations. Topics include political regimes, industrialization, economic structures, languages, urban development, rural society, family and population, environmental protection, and climate change. Through a variety of textual and visual learning materials, students acquire the basic conceptual and comparative tools to appreciate the rise of China within historical and global contexts.

This course is designed for senior international students majoring in Chinese language (for foreign learners) with a focus on language and culture. It aims to help students understand the main characteristics of the Chinese language by comparing the similarities and differences in expression methods and syntactic structures between English and Chinese. Additionally, through practical translation exercises from English to Chinese, the course seeks to reinforce and deepen students' understanding of Chinese and enhance their ability to express themselves more accurately in Chinese. The ultimate goal is to increase students' interest in English-Chinese translation and cultivate their basic translation skills.

Target students: Learners with a command of 1200 (or above) Chinese words
Objective:  to improve students’ command of intermediate grammar; to further enlarge their vocabulary and enhance their ability to read and write; to acquaint students with features of Chinese language and culture; to help students improve fluency, accuracy and appropriateness.
Content: Intermediate Grammar; common Chinese expressions; writing skills: narration, comparison, description, argumentation; most common Chinese radicals; Chinese vocabulary (around 1800-2500 words).
 

This is a knowledge-based course introducing the Chinese language and culture. Contents include theories and applications concerning the Chinese language and culture; theories, practices, and situations of teaching and learning Chinese as a second language (including Putonghua and Cantonese learning); the importance of culture in Chinese as a second language; and the language policies and its use in Hong Kong and in Mainland China.

This course is tailored for undergraduate international students with an intermediate level of Chinese proficiency, with the objective of enhancing their Chinese reading and writing abilities. Students will be able to read articles of moderate to higher difficulty, with a length of about 1000-1200 words in class. The materials include both popular science articles and scholarly essays, which are rich in content and possess considerable theoretical depth, capable of stimulating students' thought processes. These articles will also serve as exemplary texts for writing analysis, allowing students to master the essential skills of academic paper writing through reading, complemented by specific writing exercises in class. Additionally, the course will focus on the understanding and application of written vocabulary, with an emphasis on the differentiation of near-synonyms and grammatical error analysis, thereby enabling students to appreciate the beauty of the Chinese language in aspects such as rhetoric and syllabic rhythm.

This course deals with various aspects of Chinese characters. The historical portion of the course covers the origin of the Chinese characters, the principles of character formation, the evolution of styles over time, analyses of correlations between shapes and meanings, traces of pronunciations of Old Chinese as revealed in phonogram graphs, etc. The contemporary study covers an appraisal of the Simplified Characters, an evaluation of the Chinese characters in terms of frequency studies and neurolinguistic studies. The course requires students to take several prerequisites.

Target Student: Intermediate level learners 
Objective: to improve students’ listening and speaking skills; to expose students to Chinese culture and society; to acquaint students with phonetic system and grammar for oral expression.
Content: Vocabulary Building; Themes-related speech; Chinese Vocabulary (around 1200 words)