1. The tradition
2. The Technology
3. The Course
4. Our printed and on-line textbooks
Chinese people have learnt and used their language for at least thousands of years. As an important carrier of one the oldest tradition in the world, Chinese language has also formed its own tradition of learning. It is impossible to learn this language efficiently without knowing the methods that Chinese people has been adopting in their long history. This is why we choose Chinese Primer as our textbook and adopt its way of learning. This textbook follows the tradition of Prof. Y. R. Chao's Mandarin Primer, which keeps the basic elements of traditional Chinese learning methods, such as text recital, character copying, etc. These methods, though sometimes make foreigners feel uneasy, has been proven until now the most efficient ways of learning this language.
While keeping the ancient tradition alive, Prof. Y. R. Chao also had an open mind to our ever changing world and made great efforts to make Chinese language learning modernized and easier for foreigners to understand. Exploring and summarizing Chinese grammar with western grammatical concepts, his A Grammar of Spoken Chinese is considered a classic of the field and a major contribution to modern Chinese. Chinese Primer kept open mind and tried all the latest language learning technologies at its time by producing the book together with audiotapes and videotapes.
The latest development in Chinese language teaching technology is the Internet. Started from late 1990's, educational institutes and individuals around the world, as well as the governmental institutes in China, have built dozens of Chinese language teaching web sites that seriously explored various possibilities of using the technology to improve the language learning. While still in its early stage of development and no real evaluation has been done, scholars generally agree that the experiments have shown the great potential of Internet for the improvement of Chinese learning. Basically speaking, Web assisted Chinese learning has the following features:
- It's powerful! It is a combination of all the traditional media, e.g. books, tapes, CDs, etc. and more, e.g. communications, surfing, etc.
- It's flexible! It has much more flexibility than any traditional media does. It's low cost, which enables teachers make whatever they want and whenever they want. It's easy to be updated. While traditional media like books or CDs can be revised on yearly basis, web sites can easily be updated on weekly or even daily basis. This feature enables teachers to make their specific web publications for specific group of students, with instant response to students' reactions and requirements.
- It provides a virtual language environment. After a decade of Chinese web development, today virtually you can do everything in Internet, reading Chinese newspapers and books, listening to Chinese radios, watching Chinese televisions, communicating with Chinese friends. This virtual language environment is especially meaningful for Israeli Chinese learners, who can hardly find a single Chinese person or a Chinese book in real life.
- It's practical! With the development of the Internet, today a large quantity of Chinese language related jobs, such as translation, data collection, academic research, is done over Internet. The ability of dealing with Chinese in computer and Internet has become more and more important to anyone who wants to be successful with the language.
The only shortcoming of the Internet is that it's still not as convenient as some traditional media is. You can listen to a tape while riding on a bus where no web connection can be found. However, the huge advantage of it has made this difference trivial, and with the development of wireless Internet connection, this disadvantage is expected to disappear eventually.
This is why we are building this web site - Holy Land Chinese, and are using it tremendously in our course! The site serves as a learning center as well as a community center for Chinese speakers and learners in Israel. Other than helpful materials for your study, you may also find information on our activities, and may express your own opinion or ask a question.
We are providing a two-year course of Mandarin Chinese, 6 hours a week (4 hours of lesson + 2 hours of exercises) with the emphasis of the ability of communication. The aim of the course is to give the students both the fish (Chinese Language) and the fish pole (the ability of learning and using the language with the assistance of both on-line and printed tools).
In the first year course, students will learn the basic knowledge about Chinese language and its grammar, learn to pronounce it correctly, build up an elementary vocabulary that stresses on daily life but not necessarily in China, know very well about 450 Chinese characters, and study relevant cultural knowledge. At the same time, students will learn basic knowledge of Chinese Internet, learn how to use our web site as a learning assistant, how to write Chinese in computer, and how to use Chinese on-line tools. They will also find a Chinese penpal under the guidance of the teachers and establish a primary-stage e-mail communication with him.
In the second year course, students are required to speak only Chinese in class. The learning contents are consisted of advanced level of grammar and usage of words, usage of printed dictionary, advanced level of reading comprehension and writing ability. While continuing to use our web site in their studies, students also learn Chinese web knowledge in an advanced level and learn how to surf Chinese web pages. They will also learn how to use more on-line Chinese tools to skip their current language proficiency, so that they can read and compose something much more complicated than their real language level. The activity of Chinese penpal will continue and be conducted in a higher level.
The course is conducted with strict disciplines and requirements of presence at the classes, homeworks, weekly quiz, projects and final exams (both oral and written).
To see the level at the end of first year and second years courses, try our sample final exams here, first year, second year.
4. Our printed
and on-line textbooks
| Title | Author | Where to get |
|
First year course |
||
| Chinese Primer | Ta-tuan Ch'en, Perry Link, Yih-jian Tai, Hai-tao Tang | Dionon |
| Supplementary Materials for Fisrt Year Course | Zhang Ping | Dani, Dept. of Foreign Languages, Web Building, 2nd floor. |
| Supplementary Exercises for First Yera's Exercises | Zhang Li | Dani, Dept. of Foreign Languages, Web Building, 2nd floor. |
| Holy Land Chinese | Zhang Ping, Zhang Li | http://www.tau.ac.il/~pzhang/index.html |
| Second year course | ||
| Chinese Primer (fisrt semester) | Ta-tuan Ch'en, Perry Link, Yih-jian Tai, Hai-tao Tang | Dionon |
| Supplementary Materials for Second Year Course | Zhang Ping, Noga Shachar-Zhang | Dani, Dept. of Foreign Languages, Web Building, 2nd floor. |
| Holy Land Chinese | Zhang Ping, Zhang Li | http://www.tau.ac.il/~pzhang/index.html |
| A Trip to China (second semester) | Chou Chih-p'ing | Dionon |
| Far East Chinese-English Dictionary | Liang Shih-chiu | Dionon |
© 2002 by Dr. Zhang Ping and Mrs. Zhang Li