CHIN 201-01, Intermediate Chinese, Fall 2004

Abstract

In addition to the same objectives for the first year, this course aims at improving students’ aural-oral skills to achieve fluency and comprehension, further developing their proficiency in reading for understanding, and enhancing their ability to write in Chinese and to translate from Chinese into English and vice versa. At the end of the year course students should be able to read authentic materials of reasonable degrees of difficulty, to write simple compositions in Chinese characters, and to translate chosen materials from Chinese into English and vice versa. We will continue the regimen, as established in the first year, of daily practice in oral-aural skills as well as memorizing words and characters, but we will confronting each area of language acquisition--listening, speaking, reading, and writing-- at a considerably higher level of sophistication. For example, we will be doing listening and reading comprehension exercises on passages of gradually increasing length and complexity, and 2 the topics for our speaking exercises will include not only those from daily life but also those about some social issues. We will also be doing more writing, composing sentences and short passages at first and eventually short essays. As a rule, second-year texts dispense with Romanization altogether, and it is hoped that by the end of the year students will be able to read without difficulty extended passages written only in Chinese characters.