Continuing instruction in spoken and written Chinese, with particular emphasis on consolidating basic conversational skills and improving reading confidence and depth. Lab work required. This course is designed to consolidate the foundation built in Elementary Chinese and continue developing students skills in aural comprehension, reading, and writing. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to speak Chinese with some fluency on basic conversational topics, achieve a basic level of reading competence within simplified and traditional characters learned plus common compounds, and be able to write short compositions.
This subject is the first semester of two that form an introduction to modern standard Chinese, commonly called Mandarin. Though not everyone taking this course will be an absolute beginner, the course presupposes no prior background in the language. The purpose of this course is to develop: (a) basic conversational abilities (pronunciation, fundamental grammatical patterns, common vocabulary, and standard usage); (b) basic reading skills (in both the traditional character set and the simplified); (c) an understanding of the way the Chinese writing system is structured, and the ability to copy and write characters; and (d) a sense of what learning a language like Chinese entails, and the sort of learning processes that it involves, so students are able to continue studying effectively on their own.
The main text is Wheatley, J. K. Learning Chinese: A Foundation Course in Mandarin. Part I. (unpublished, but available online). (Part II of the book forms the basis of 21F.102 / 152, which is also published on OpenCourseWare.)
This online textbook represents materials that were used in the first four semesters (two years) of the Mandarin program at MIT. They eventually formed the basis of a print textbook of the same name, published by Yale University Press; information and supplemental materials for the Yale edition are available at the companion website. The OCW course materials were extensively revised, and at times reordered, before publication, but the general principles of the original remain: to provide a comprehensive resource for the foundation levels of Chinese language that separates the learning of oral skills from literary (the former being transcribed in pinyin, and the latter in characters). This resource contains the complete online version of the text and accompanying audio recordings.
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