CHIN 302            3 Credit Hours

Intermediate Chinese Usage II

This information is for second semester 2017/2018 academic year

Teacher responsible

Mrs. Huang Lijian

Availability

This course is available open to all visiting students but only as a second semester course.

Course Content

This course builds the content of CHIN 301. Students will gain more knowledge about Chinese Reading Comprehension, Conversation and Characters. This course will emphasize the acquisition of the most useful expressions and sentences about the student’s everyday Chinese. This course will add about 300 Chinese characters and related compounds to the repertoire acquired in Elementary Chinese. Students will also be introduced to slightly more sophisticated sentence structures of Mandarin Chinese.

Teaching

Thursday, 11:30am- 13:20pm for 13 weeks.

Presentation of the topics takes the form of a lecture and discussion on set topics. Students are required to read course materials before the class session it is assigned for. The Lecturer will not repeat the reading; usually, lectures will involve illustrating selected points by working through pieces of data. Students are expected to come prepared to discuss, with their questions that arise out of the reading.

Formative Coursework

Students are expected to work a minimum of one and half hours every day. Routine preparation includes writing characters, studying the vocabulary, patterns and texts, reading grammar notes. Homework assignment includes character exercises, grammar exercises, translation exercises and essays. A vocabulary quiz is given through each lesson.

Indicative reading

1.         Liu, Xun. (2006). New Practical Chinese Reader Text book 3 & Exercise book 3. Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press.

2.         Liu, Yun & Shi, Peizhi. (2013). New HSK vocabulary (Level 1, 2, 3). Beijing: Peking University Press.

3.         Zhang, Jing. (2008). Practicing HSK Grammar (Level 3). Beijing: Sinolingua.

4.         Ye, Lang & Zhu, Liangzhi. (2008). Insights into Chinese Culture. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Dictionary

The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Chinese-English Edition). (2002). Beijing: Foreigh Language Teaching and Research Press.

Online Dictionaries

Baiducidian 百度词典:  http://dict.baidu.com/

Chinese dictionary, good for example sentences which are translated to English

Haici 海词:      http://dict.cn/

Good for examples and usage, includes ‘Instand Grammar Checker’ to improve your writing.

MandarinSpot:            http://mandarinspot.com/

Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionary designed to help students in their study of Chinese language and reading Chinese online. Here you can add Mandarin pronunciation to any Chinese text as either Hanyu Pinyin, often called simply Pinyin, Zhuyin Fuhao also known as Bopomofo or other, less known Chinese phonetic systems. You can use both Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters as long as you don't mix them inside one word.  Paste in Chinese text to get character-by-character Pinyin.

Yellowbridge dictionary:        https://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/dictionary.php

Mandarin – English character dictionary with animation of the stroke order.

Recommended Websites
http://english.cctv.com/

http://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Chinese.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIWFv4mkJGE (Happy Chinese)

Assessment and Grading

Evaluation will be based on a continued assessment which will constitute 30% and a final end of semester examination which will constitute 70%.

Grading Scale: