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Being one of the world's oldest civilizations, and having the world's largest market, China offers unique opportunities to a wide array of disciplines that range from business to science. The possibilities are truly endless in China's steadily growing economy. Learning Mandarin (Chinese) enables us to explore the endless treasure of its ancient past as well as provide us ample opportunity to a huge job market in all of the countries where Mandarin is the language of commerce.
The Chinese courses are designed and taught to prepare our students to excel in listening, speaking, reading and writing. New Trier High School Chinese program also offers students the opportunity to travel to China in our summer trip exchange program. This program gives students who choose to go and visit China and gain basic knowledge and skills necessary for their study abroad.

1. More people read Chinese language than any other language in the world!

1. How hard is it to learn Chinese ?

According to U.S. State Department language training experts, Chinese ranks with Japanese and Arabic as one of the hardest languages for native speakers of English to learn. It takes about three times as long to attain a given level of fluency in Chinese as in Spanish or French.
Three things make Chinese harder than European languages to learn. First, the writing system is very complex. Perhaps half of the time spent in learning Chinese is spent memorizing characters. Second, European languages have many words which are similar to English words. Third, unlike English, Chinese is a tonal language, and for some students it is difficult to develop the habit of listening for tonal distinctions and producing them in speech. On the other hand, Chinese grammar is remarkably simple. There are no inflections, cases, genders, or declensions. Many people who begin to learn Chinese quickly get "hooked" on it, because it is so interesting.

1. Are Chinese characters hard to learn?

Chinese characters can be difficult (although learning to recognize characters is easier than memorizing how to write them). But spoken Chinese is easier to learn than you might think. Chinese grammar is very simple. English speakers sometimes complain that languages like Spanish have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc.). Well, Chinese speakers complain that way about English. Make sure you start off by practicing pronunciation, because a bad pronunciation is hard to correct later. And make sure to get your tones right!

1. What is the focus of the program here?

The Chinese program at St. Edward's is multimedia based, designed to provide students with the basic language skills needed to function in contemporary China with the skills needed to read classical and contemporary Chinese publications. In the first year classes we give roughly equal emphasis to speaking and reading. In the second year, the emphasis shifts slightly toward reading. Our general goal throughout is to make the coursework practical, interesting, and relevant. We see language as part of a larger culture and try to integrate the part with the whole.

1. What are dialects?

A dialect is a variation of a particular language (for instance, British English versus American English). Chinese has numerous dialects. Because of China's long history, these have diverged greatly, to the point that they are mutually unintelligible (speakers of one dialect can't understand speakers of another dialect). For this reason, Chinese dialects are sometimes considered separate languages, but common history and a common writing system (Chinese characters) have had a strong unifying influence. The main dialect spoken in mainland China is Mandarin language (sometimes called Putonghua). There are more people on Earth who speak Mandarin than speakers of English. Cantonese is widely spoken in Hong Kong and in many overseas Chinese communities. Taiwanese (sometimes called Hoklo) is spoken in Taiwan, in addition to Mandarin.
6.  What are tones?
In English, words are sometimes spoken with a certain intonation. Rising intonation indicates a question: * He left. [stating a fact; voice is flat] * He left? [asking a question; voice rises]
In Chinese, intonation is much more fundamental: it's part of a word's pronunciation. If your voice rises when it should have fallen, you can end up saying a completely different word (with embarrassing consequences). Linguists call Chinese a tonal language. A classic example is "Ma ma ma ma?", which means "does mother curse the horse?" (but only if you say it right!). Getting tones right is pretty tricky for English speakers learning Chinese , but it's important.

1. Does Chinese have an alphabet?

No, Chinese language uses characters which are very different from an alphabet. Characters generally have two parts, one of which represents the meaning and the other the sound. Every character corresponds to a single syllabble in Chinese, so the part which represents the sound does not represent a phoneme like a letter in an alphabet but rather represents a whole syllable. For this reason, it is said that Chinese has a syllabary rather than an alphabet. This syllabary is not very helpful since the same symbols often represent many different sounds and the same sounds are represented by many different symbols. This is due to changes in speech over the millenia.

 

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