<p>As I understand it, and this may have changed, but the department starts with traditional characters and then drops them as you move forward. This mimics a policy seen at other school’s, e.g. Cornell’s FALCON program. The idea is that by being able to recognize certain core traditional characters, you are somehow better linguistically situated. </p>
<p>I would definitely email East Asian Languages and Civlizations to see how they deal with people who say, place into second year Mandarin with no knowledge of non-simplified script, or if their are special sections for those who do not want to learn traditional characters. I cannot imagine they would be so anal as to let such a policy deter students from enrollment.</p>