<p>Does anybody know whether the Chinese language courses at UChicago teach simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese?</p>
<p>We offer mostly "modern" Chinese, but we also have a year of "literary" Chinese, for which two years of modern Chinese is a prereq:</p>
<p>Chinese</a> Courses - East Asian Languages & Civilizations | The University of Chicago</p>
<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>
<p>I think the normal courses only teach simplified.</p>
<p>However, I know that for the bilingual class, they have to let the students decide between simplified and traditional to accompany the students from Taiwan. Both students will be in the same class, but as the teacher knows both traditional and simplified, there will be no problems.</p>
<p>I don't know all the details, but most textbooks have simplified and traditional versions, so if you'd prefer traditional, perhaps the teacher could accompany you by allowing you to go along with the traditional text instead of the simplified text. I don't know why you'd want to learn traditional, though, unless you have some kind of connection with Taiwan.</p>
<p>Could be useful for Hong Kong.</p>
<p>Ah. Yeah, I suppose that works too.</p>
<p>Thanks a ton, guys. I was never able to find the textbooks they use for the classes, but this somewhat clarifies things.</p>
<p>At least in my friend's class last year, they got to pick between simplified and traditional. Most people chose simplified.</p>