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 more in writing than in speech. Class deals with original and authentic materials such as song lyrics, poems, jokes, narrative films, etc..
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. You are expected to write short notes, text messages, job applications, brief film criticisms, and cultural commentaries.
You are expected to come to class 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 |
Do not lose sleep over the switch from colloquial to written communication. It is true that written Chinese is arguably a different language from the spoken one. But it is important to know that most scholarly and intellectual exchanges are still largely conducted in the manner of oral speech and communicate in modern Chinese (not classical or literary Chinese).
We need to adjust our expectations somewhat. In a sense, reading can be exclusive to privilege written characters. Publications in the print media usually usually favor formal writing rather than oral communication or conversational exchanges. We might translate or paraphrase some classical Chinese. For this reason, we encourage summaries of some written text and translate it into spoken Chinese in your own words.