Beginner: 1 Year Standard Chinese Language Course

1: 3-month crash course on conversational Chinese, focusing on listening and speaking skills. This will allow students to meet the basic needs in their personal and academic lives in China. They will be able to actually talking to Chinese people in Chinese, and start to think in Chinese, building the confidence and the foundation for next step.

2: Next 3 months is to include intensive drills on sounds and tones, vocabulary, grammatical constructions, and characters in meaningful contexts.

3: During the rest of the academic year, students will be required to comprehend and produce paragraph-level Chinese. Rigorous practice of speaking and writing Chinese in complex communicative activities are complemented by intensive drills to fine-tune pronunciation, expand vocabulary, and internalize more complex grammatical constructions. Students will also do intensive reading of expository writings on a variety of cultural topics. The main language used for this part of the course will be in Chinese.

Course work also includes Calligraphy, Poem Recital, Folk Dancing, Chorus, Chinese Festival, Chinese Cuisine, Chinese Chess, Majiang, Broadcasting, Mountain Climbing, Beach Volleyball and other extra-curricular activities.