Chinese Reading and Conversation *Online* *NEW*

This course assumes that students have completed at least 110 hours of Chinese class time, or 8 terms at CCAE. It expects students to recognize many of the characters of Yong Ho’s two textbooks. It uses Pinyin infrequently and only for new vocabulary. It will assign students to read chapter books from the Breakthrough Level and Level 1 of the Mandarin Companion: Chinese Graded Readers series. These books of crafted stories are designed to improve students’ reading proficiency by training the brain to visually associate characters with sounds and vocabulary and to learn to recognize common patterns, thereby making the qualitative jump from mostly relying on Pinyin to relying primarily on character recognition. The class time will be divided between reading some chapters aloud and answering discussion questions in Chinese, as well as covering certain vocabulary usage and grammar points relevant to the stories. Required books: The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng (ISNB: 978-1941875391) and The Secret Garden (ISBN: 978-1941875001).
Instructor: Jin Chen Cooper

Sections

Instructor

Jin Chen Cooper is an Associate in Research of Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and a Rapporteur for the Harvard Asia Center reporting on the talk series "Critical Issues Confronting China," and other Center events. From 2005 to 2013, she was a specially invited columnist of Caixin Media (formerly Caijing Magazine), for which she published a weekly column, “Notes from Harvard.” Jin holds an MA in Regional Studies - East Asia (RSEA) from Harvard University, an MBA with concentration in finance from the Carroll School of Management of Boston College, and a BA in mathematics and economics from Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and two children.