Description

Hi, everyone, welcome to College Mandarin Chinese on your own beginning level. My name is Hong Zeng. I am a professor of Chinese for 16 year at prestigious American liberal arts colleges and universities. I have two PhDs in Chinese and comparative language and literature and published five well-endorsed books in America in this realm. In two colleges, in my classroom teaching, I had more than doubled the beginning Chinese class enrollment in just one year.  As you all know, China has risen to be the biggest economic body of the world, and Chinese has become the second most learned language in American Colleges and secondary schools. Learning Chinese will earn you a great advantage in career opportunities in today’s world. It is the language of business and politics, education and government. Besides, as the father of modern American poetry Ezra Pound claims, Chinese language and written characters “contain the fundamentals of all aesthetics”. However, a lot of college students and adult open learners found they don’t have enough time and financial resources to study Chinese in a classroom setting. Many middle and high schools students also found that 4-6 years of their learning in the secondary school can only be tested at most as one year’s college Chinese in the college placement tests.

This course is a perfect answer to the above difficulties. It allows you to learn one full year’s college Chinese curriculum in just two months and save you more than 10 thousand dollars of college tuition.  It has 8 sections and about 120 lectures, altogether 18 hours. You will learn the same range of vocabulary, grammar and situational dialogues as a classroom student would learn in a whole year, including its sound system, writing system, written character stroke order, grammar and situational dialogues such as greetings, family, dates and time, hobbies, make appointments, visit friends, school life, diary, shopping, traffic, sports, dining, weather and party.

In this course I adopt the same methods of teaching as in classroom setting for 16 years: As in the classroom I adopts an interactive, immersive method of teaching and practicing vocabulary and grammar. To put it more specifically, as soon as I introduced 7-10 vocabularies, I will ask you to pause the slide and have an intense, flash memory of these vocabularies in 1-2 minutes:  their sound, meaning and usage, then I will turn to a new slide with only pictures and no written Chinese vocabularies, you will do oral exercises with these vocabularies: such as describe the pictures, answer my questions with the visual cues, or translating, in the time space I give you after each question, before I provide the correct answer for you to check whether you did right. Such methods bring teaching, reviewing, testing and application into a quick circulation resembling immersive learning of language: you have to be alert in absorbing language information, memorizing and applying it to immediate use on the spot. The same method is used for teaching the grammar. For the text, I will lead you to read the text two times, give you time space to repeat after me sentence by sentence to ensure the accuracy of your pronunciation and tone. For the third time, you will just listen to my reading of the text, and afterwards answer my questions in the space I provide you after each question, and then listen to my answer to check your correctness. For practice writing, I demonstrate the stroke order of each Chinese character you will learn, in a PDF document, adding one stroke after another in the correct order and record each process. After 2-3 lessons there will be a unit test, and there are also two final exams, one after each 7 lessons, just like the two-semester curriculum in classroom Chinese course in one year.

For learning this course, you will spend half an hour each day. Each lesson has two dialogues, for each dialogue, you will spend two days. For the first day, you will learn the vocabulary, grammar and the text on my two powerpoint videos. For the second day, you will review them and practice writing characters according to my character stroke order PDF document. So each lesson you spend about 4 days. You have 14 lessons, that means you will spend 56 days in total, and you can spend 4 days in the beginning introduction section with its teaching of sound and writing system,  so you will finish the course in two months.  You will achieve the same degree of proficiency as a classroom Chinese student who studied for one year, at the same time save 10 thousand dollars of college tuition. After this beginning class I will soon publish the intermediate and advanced level College Chinese online course. For six months, you can reach the advanced level of college Chinese that other students have to study 3 years in the college classroom and save 30000 dollars of college tuition. You will not only be fluent in daily conversation, but  also in advanced discussion of social, economic and cultural topics.