Series of Chinese language courses
A complete series of four Chinese language courses covering beginning to intermediate levels has been added to the website. These courses are offered at MIT and are made available through the MIT OpenCourseWare project. The courses are accompanied by downloadable textbooks in pdf format and audio recordings of dialogues. Julian K. Wheatley is the instructor for these courses and author of the textbook Learning Chinese: A Foundation Course in Mandarin Parts 1-4 used for the courses. Prior background in Chinese is not required to take these courses.The purpose of Chinese I and II is to develop (i) basic conversational abilities (pronunciation, fundamental grammatical patterns, common vocabulary, and standard usage) (ii) basic reading and writing skills (in both the traditional character set and the simplified) and (iii) an understanding of the language learning process so that students are able to continue studying effectively on your own.
In Chinese III, students will complete the basic grammatical survey of the language begun in the earlier courses and consolidate and improve conversational skills; in reading, there will be a transition from the short texts of the sort encountered in Chinese I and II to stories adapted from traditional Chinese tales.
In Chinese IV, students will consolidate and expand conversational usage and grammatical and cultural knowledge encountered in prior courses in the sequence, while focusing on improving reading and listening abilities.
The links for the courses are as follows:
Chinese I (MIT)
Chinese II (MIT)
Chinese III (MIT)
Chinese IV (MIT)
(03 May 2009)
