Description

Introduction of the Course: (College Mandarin Chinese on Your Own Intermediate Level 1)

Welcome to College Mandarin Chinese  Intermediate Level 1! I am Hong Zeng, an award-winning professor of Chinese for 16 years at prestigious American liberal arts college and universities. I have taught at UNC, Chapel Hill, College of William and Mary, Carleton College, Swarthmore College and Hamline University. I have two PhDs in Chinese and comparative language and literature, and published five books in these realms well-endorsed by world-renowned experts in my fields. College Mandarin Chinese intermediate level is a sequence of my 5-star College Chinese Beginning level that I published, which was rated as “the most thorough and systematic introduction of Chinese language”.

This sequence of 5 Chinese language courses at beginning, intermediate and advanced level will truly allow you to learn 3 years’ college Chinese curriculum in just 6 months, at the convenience of your home and available time. While greatly speeding up the learning process, it can also allow you to save 36000 dollars of college tuition while achieving the same degree of proficiency. Some students might ask how can an online course so much speed up the language learning process? In my view, It has been a long-standing misconception that language learning must need classroom interaction and communication, and online language class is only supplementary or secondary to classroom language class. As a professor of Chinese in the classroom for 16 years, I can tell you honestly what is in online language course that surpasses classroom teaching. Suppose you are in 1 hour language class in the classroom of 15-20 students, how many minutes can you really practice in front of the class and corrected by the teacher? Perhaps less than five minutes, for the most of the time, you have to listen to peer students stuttering, accented speaking, and even if you are a  fast language learner, you have comply to the pace of much slower learners. On the other hand, online language course can have the same presence of a language instructor, while you alone have all the practice time, listening only to the fluent, correct pronunciation of the instructor. Moreover, you can repeat after the teachers’ reading of the text sentence by sentence for as many times as you like to ensure the accuracy of your pronunciation. Like in the classroom, you can answer the teachers’ questions about the text, using newly-learned vocabulary or grammar to describe pictures and do translation, with the instructor’s correct answer right after your own answer for checking correctness. In other words, it can simulate most of the teacher-student interaction through its exercises while speeding up the learning process with you being the sole practicing person in the course.  Moreover, in my online Chinese course, with one slide introducing the language information and the very next slide testing your application of these language information, you can have the close propinquity of instruction and testing at every short turn like that of Rosetta Stone, which brings learning, reviewing, testing and application into a quick succession resembling immersive learning process, which would be difficult to facilitate in a classroom. However as a language software, Rosetta Stone doesn’t have the presence of a personal instructor as in online courses or classroom teaching that can explain and clarify grammar, and sound and writing system. That’s why online course can greatly speed up language learning process, achieve the learning efficiency and speed that is hard to facilitate in classroom setting.

College Mandarin Chinese on Your Own Intermediate level 1 is the first half of the intermediate college Chinese in this language sequence. It introduces Chinese that allows you to function in the essential daily situations and in traveling, such as seeing a doctor, renting an apartment, dating and courtship, sports, travel, order air tickets and check-in language and boarding the plane, and the origin and practice of major Chinese festivals. When I introduce the vocabulary and grammar, I make sure that as soon as you are introduced to 7-10 vocabularies or one grammar in a single slide, you will be allowed 1-2 minutes to flash memorize them on the spot and be tested immediately in the very next slide to do oral practice with them, such as describe pictures, translation, fill in blanks so that language knowledge is immediately converted into your language skill. For text practice, you will read after me sentence by sentence for two times to ensure that accuracy of your pronunciation, and practice listening comprehension by orally answering my questions after listen to my reading, with correcting answers from me immediately after each of your answers. To strengthen your listening comprehension and speaking, I put on a lot of acting videos of the text dialogues and reviewing videos that turn text dialogues into summing narratives, through these talking head videos you can closely observe my mouth shape in pronunciation as well.

This course has 7 lessons and each lesson is learned in four days: two days for one of the two dialogues in each lesson. For the first day, you will watch the two powerpoint videos: the vocabulary and grammar video of that dialogue; and the text practice video.  You can watch the acting videos too. For the convenience of your reviewing and reference, I put a pdf version of both powerpoints in the resource part of each video. For the second day, you will practice writing of the vocabularies listed in pdf version of vocabulary and grammar powerpoint video. It is strongly advised that you would take my beginning level class to be acquainted with the stroke order, so that you can practice writing these characters in the correct stroke order. My Beginning Level College Chinese also teaches you the sound and writing system and Chinese radicals, which will make your pronunciation accurate and greatly simplify your memory of the Chinese’ writing. I think one great limitation of current Chinese online language courses is that for the sake of easy learning, it omitted a systematic introduction of Chinese grammar, sound and writing system. A systematic learning of grammar will allow students to create and multiply language on their own based on the grammatic rule. Sound system will enable the students to pronounce in the correct accent, and writing system will allow the students remember the characters’ writing much more easily, as 50 thousand Chinese characters are composed only of less than 100 meaningful components and 400 sound components. Thus for 7 lessons, you will finish learning them in 28 days, plus some days for the unit test and final exam. You can finish the course in one month.

After this language sequence, I will publish business Chinese in a few days, but the beginning and intermediate Chinese are bases for learning the more sophisticated and formal vocabulary of business Chinese, so seize the opportunity, choose this sequence of Chinese language course and build a great career using your Chinese skill!