This course is for all who have taken second year Chinese or have the language equivalent. The objectives include achieving the ease with which you communicate with the native speakers both in speech and in writing. Class deals with original and authentic materials such as song lyrics, poems, jokes, narrative films, etc.. The working language for this class is Chinese.
Cultural identity is often achieved performatively. If your tones are off, if you are unfamiliar with idioms, or if you don’t recognize expressions, then your presence in China is diminished and your ability to engage formal conversation compromised. Respect the language you are learning by speaking it whenever you can to overcome your psychological inhibitions.
You are expected to come to class fully prepared, having gone over the new vocabulary, read the grammar points for each lesson, and listened to the audio recordings of the lesson at least once. We go over all of these in class only on need-basis. Most class time is devoted to practice and performance, to reach the HSK high-intermediate proficiency level.
Take initiatives and develop your own approach to teaching materials. The students in this class tend to have different levels of linguistic proficiency and backgrounds, some just come back from abroad and others may be heritage students. To ensure that true learning takes place, you must participate as if you were the only one in the class.
To ensure some continuity, we’ll adopt the textbooks as follows:
| Reading Into A New China: Volume I; Duanduan Li, and Irene Liu; Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc., 2010; ISBN:978-0-88727-627-9 |
Some may be anxious about the dramatic increase of vocabulary. As we dive into written Chinese, which is arguably a different language from the spoken one, it is important to know that you are now at the level of scholarly exchange with, not street people but, those for whom writing is the main or the only way to communicate!
Therefore, we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. Focus not be on the precise meaning of a word that is already highly obscure and abstract but on how much ancient scribes (and modern intellectuals) assemble and produce knowledge, almost like code-workers encoding and decoding messages within and among members of a secret society.
In a sense, reading can be exclusive when written characters are privileged, the opposite of speaking (listening) to people around you to include them. This is also why we need to learn it as we do biochemistry or neuroscience, where only the well-trained elite get to understand the literature.
Our method is therefore to translate written Chinese, the legacy of classical Chinese, into spoken Chinese, and not the other way around. For this reason, we encourage summaries of the text, using your own words. You don’t need to copy a text. You can summarize and translate it into spoken Chinese.