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The Chinese Program, a new addition to FL&L in 1991, offers training in Mandarin at three levels--beginning, intermediate, and advanced. Students, upon completion of the three years of training, will have a sound working knowledge of the Chinese language, and will be able to read about 3500-4000 characters, and over 10,000 vocabulary items in the form of combinations of two or more characters.

For students who have yet to study the Chinese language but are interested in various humanistic aspects of Chinese culture, the program also offers courses in English on classical fiction and drama. It is our belief that the quintessence of Chinese culture, the link between the past and the future, can best be found in classical masterpieces.

The misconception that has persisted among American students is that the Chinese language is extremely difficult because of its characteristics of tonal changes in sound and hieroglyphic forms in writing. But, in fact, this is not true. For instance, the English verb has to commit itself as to number, tense, mood and voice, while the Chinese verb remains constantly neutral in all these respects. Its syntactical construction is not dependent on the device of inflection, but is just a question of word-order. Students learning to speak Mandarin can actually acquire fairly good fluency within a year.

As the economic growth continues in the Asia-Pacific region, the study of Chinese language and culture has taken on a new urgency in the United States. Like many other academic institutions, MIT is committed to develop and expand our Chinese program in the future.