flutegirl13

Does anyone recommend taking Chinese class @ CMU?

I am an ABC whose parents are from Taiwan, so I grew up speaking and listening to Mandarin. Writing and reading I need to work on (I try to do that at home, which is not hard to do). I scored a 750 on the SAT II for Chinese (100% on listening!) Oh, and because my parents are from Taiwan, I grew up learning traditional Chinese.

And do we need to take a placement test if we decide to take Chinese...?

KrazyKow

I know some people who have taken Chinese, and they've been pretty happy. For placement in languages other than Spanish and French, you email or stop by the modern languages department (in the front of Baker/Porter) and set up an interview with a faculty member.

ten20j

There are plenty of ABC's at CMU in a similar situation as you. I found that a lot of them took the "Intensive" Chinese series which are designed specifically for students who can speak well but read or write poorly. In the beginner class, the teacher spoke Chinese the entire class from the very beginning, and focused on teaching vocabulary words. We learned around 20-25 new words each week. Admittedly, the class did not benefit me in the long run (I have forgotten all the words!), but that's probably because I didn't continue on to the Intermediate and Advanced classes immediately after. In your case, it may be necessary to start in the Intermediate class, because they really do teach basic words in Beginner. However, you do not have to “place” into the Beginner class, you can proceed directly to put it in your schedule. If you want to move directly to Intermediate, you’ll have to speak to the foreign language department.

Most of the students were from Taiwan, so they were annoyed by the simplified and mainland style of speaking. However, they were allowed to write traditional characters on tests and homeworks if preferred.

hohohmm

if you don't mind, we can conduct long talk, long enough until you are bored, in Chinese. I'm an absolute, pure-blood native speaker. Yeah~

flutegirl13

hohohmm: hahah hao! okay that's fine. i think i'm your facebook friend, actually...

i messed around with my schedule on tcpulse and i couldn't really fit in chinese (beginner or intermediate) without it running into another class. grr. oh well. i'll probably take chinese at one point or another @ cmu. the other languages sound really fun (i know a little french, some spanish due to high school, and italian is eerily similar to spanish...) but how useful they'd be in real life is probably in question...

"Most of the students were from Taiwan, so they were annoyed by the simplified and mainland style of speaking. However, they were allowed to write traditional characters on tests and homeworks if preferred."'

oh really? that's interesting. i have a hard time getting myself to write simplified (feng [wind]? an x? what?) so if i ever take chinese, i'll probably just end up writing traditional anyway. thanks for that bit of info.

Waffles

I don't know if this applies to the intensive courses (for native speakers), but I know that the 'regular' chinese classes are taught using the traditional characters. The teachers are supposed to enforce that everyone learn the traditional characters, but be able to recognize the simplified characters. Personally, I always just guessed at the simplified characters, because there is just a small section on each test devoted to them, and you can usually determine the traditional character based on how it looks, or the context of the sentence. That said, the teachers are really nice, and my teacher let the students get away with using simplified if they wanted to. Hope that helps. If you have any other questions about the setup of the class feel free to ask