<p>i was looking at Chicago's ap credit policy and i noticed that ap credit is given for japanese but not chinese. </p>
<p>I am planning on continuing with chinese and i was wondering; how does chinese class placement work? is there an exam?</p>
<p>There is a language competency exam you can take every year, and your placement will be based on that.</p>
<p>just curious, what kind of stuff is on the exam?</p>
<p>I don’t really remember the details, but the difficulty level is on par with or slightly more difficult than the AP Chinese test.</p>
<p>and do you write the characters by hand or is it typed?
I’m wondering because in order to study for the ap chinese test, i mainly focused learning the pinyin of the characters and typing so i feel that i would get wreaked if i had to remember how to write them by hand</p>
<p>sorry to barge in. Know nothing about AP Chinese, but in advanced Chinese, you have to learn how to write the word, just use the phonics to “find” the word in typing software is very unreliable, you may pick the wrong word for the phrase and it is very easy to make mistake like that. Also a small mistake in pinyin will create major difference in words selection and if you don’t know the word in the first place you mind as well not to learn the language.</p>
<p>hmm maybe i wasnt very clear. I can read and recognize tons characters. I just cant write a lot of them by hand because when i was studying for the ap chinese exam, it made much more sense for me to just learn to recognize characters. It would have been too time consuming to learn how to write 1500+ characters by hand in a year especially with school and college apps and other stuff. I think when summer starts, I can work to remedy that problem, but im concerned that my placement might get skewed.</p>
<p>and I think the typos you make can also depend on the IME program that you are using. Some of them like sogou are pretty good at preventing errors while others like microsoft’s just flat out suck.</p>
<p>^^ That is not the way to learn Chinese in my book. Read and Write should go together. Its like you can read English but you don’t know how to spell! But that is IMHO, you don’t have to agree. A summer of learning how to write it is not nearly enough, we spend all of our life and still cannot master the writing of Chinese.</p>
<p>bobby1001,</p>
<p>A few years ago, during the summer before I matriculated, I took a Chinese placement exam online. That placement exam was very straightforward, and there was no writing involved. I got perfect scores on AP Chinese, IB Mandarin HL, and the placement exam. My advisor said I had fulfilled the language requirement and placed me into Chinese 401 (should I decide to take any more Chinese courses).</p>
<p>If you did well on AP Chinese and do well on the placement exam, you should be able to fulfill the foreign language requirement.</p>
<p>I skipped fourth year Chinese and took one year of graduate-level Chinese. If you have forgotten how to write certain characters, like me, I strongly suggest you take Chinese 501-502-503. That sequence, at least when I took it, had no exams, just research papers. I typed up all of my research papers.</p>
<p>There are two types of language exams here. There are the language placement exams (students take these before they arrive at UChicago), and there are the competency exams (these are administered once a year usually in either winter or spring).</p>
<p>Hope this helps! Feel free to contact me should any questions arise.</p>