Chinese

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)
 

This course teaches students the basic knowledge and methods of simultaneous interpreting through lectures, exercises and guidance, enables them to acquire basic skills, and equips them with necessary training methods.

This course helps students to master the basic principles and methods of Chinese second language grammar teaching and understand the basic framework of Chinese second language teaching grammar system and main content, and have Chinese grammar teaching skills.

1. Introduction: Modern Chinese, Modern Literature and Translation 

2. Lin Shu and Literary Translation in the Late Qing Dynasty
3. Translation and the Introduction of New Types of Modern Fiction 

4. Yan Fu's Translation Theory and Translation Practice

5. Lu Xun as a Translator

6. Zhou Zuoren's Translation Activities and Achievements

This course is designed for the beginning learners who intend to acquire basic survival Chinese, especially in listening, speaking and reading. The primary emphasis is placed on listening comprehension and speaking fluency as well as reading comprehension. The goal is to improve students’ listening, speaking and reading skills, and to increase their knowledge of Chinese culture and customs.