<p>DD2 is planning to major in international business and Mandarin Chinese. She will be starting from scratch with Mandarin (has been taking Latin & French -- not much help!) Can anyone who is familiar with Wake's East Asian Language program comment about the level of fluency graduates typically achieve? She would also plan to study abroad in China at least one semester/summer/etc. Thank you!</p>
<p>“fluency” achieved generally will depend on the student and how much time is spent on the material. She’ll probably achieve working proficiency if she works very hard but if 4 years can only do so much when starting from scratch regardless of the school</p>
<p>Thank you StevenL. Do you know the typical size of Wake’s Mandarin classes? Do you have any other comments about the program there?</p>
<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I’m a current sophomore at Wake Forest majoring in Chinese. I am posting this comment from Shanghai, where I’m studying abroad this semester.</p>
<p>First, there is no such thing as “fluency” in Mandarin for non-native speakers. Most educated Chinese people will know ~10,000 characters and 40,000 character combinations/phrases. To attain that level of linguistic knowledge as a native English speaker would take at least a decade of complete immersion, constant memorization, and steady application of new phrases. I hate to burst your bubble right off the bat like that, but I feel like many folks think if they take a few Rosetta Stone courses or – oh my! – actually ~major~ in Chinese will grab up their diploma at commencement and be totally able to go around China clucking along like Chiang Kai-shek himself. It’s simply not feasible.</p>
<p>That being said, there are varying levels of functionality that Westerners can achieve. I took Mandarin in high school, have taken 2 semesters at Wake (placed out of CHI 101), and am at a functional level. I know enough to live life, make small talk, talk a little politics, honestly all the basic stuff you would talk about with the guy at McDonald’s, and a bit more on the academic side. It sounds a bit anticlimactic, I know, but there’s really no way I can quantify to you how much Mandarin I speak.</p>
<p>Do I think Wake Forest has a good Chinese program? Absolutely yes. For the first four semesters, your daughter would be going to class for an hour every day. After the first semester, there is no English spoken in the classroom except for clarification of grammatical points. If you speak English, the teachers won’t answer you. There is one EALC department head, Dr. Shi Yaohua, a former Chinese professor at Harvard who actually helped write the textbook CHI 101-201 uses. He teaches some of the Chinese major elective classes and CHI 231, the highest level of Chinese Wake offers. On the Chinese side, there is one permanent Chinese language lecturer, one lady who is a temporary lecturer but who has been at Wake for a couple of years, and then 2 TAs that come to Wake from an exchange program we have with a teaching college in Taiwan. Then on the other side are all the Japanese teachers. For the Chinese major elective classes, they will either be taught by Dr. Shi or are in another department (e.g., REL, PHI, HST) and will have professors from those departments. Wake offers a CHI 255 course, Business Chinese, that is good to take for business, as it introduces a lot of financial-specific terms (think like, talking about collateralized debt obligations in Mandarin). That would be a key class to take. Class sizes for CHI 101-201 are 10-15, when you get into Advanced Chinese (220 and up), it’s less than 10. 101 can have 20-25 people, but close to half will drop out within the first few weeks and switch back to the Romance language comfort zone. </p>
<p>After four years of Mandarin and studying abroad (required for the major), a Chinese major at Wake can expect to come out with a solid level of functionality to the point where they’re comfortable in China and can get a little technical about a variety of topics. The thing is, though, Mandarin is completely, utterly, and devastatingly different from English and the Romance languages. If she’s never taken Mandarin before, I would really encourage her to make sure she knows what she’s getting into. It’s really cool to say “international business and mandarin” and hear everyone go “ooh ahh what a smart choice,” but in reality, learning Mandarin is a lot of memorizing, a lot of tongue twisting, and hard to quantify. I hear many people talk about taking college Chinese like it’s their high school Spanish class. It’s very different; Mandarin has no conjugations or declensions, but rather functions through a system of characters called “measure words” that are tacked throughout sentences to show possession, questioning, tense, and ordinal prefixes. Each character individually means something, but stick 2, 3, 4, or 5 in a different order and it means a whole other word. There are 4 standard tones, a dead tone, and a sixth hybrid tone that, when applied to different characters, mean different things. To read a Chinese newspaper, you’ll need to know around 2,500 characters and 5,000 character combinations. It’s hard, but it’s oh so rewarding.</p>
<p>Altogether, I’m not trying to intimidate you. Wake Forest has an excellent EALC-Chinese program. Besides English, Mandarin is the best language to know. You will absolutely knock Chinese off their feet when they find out you know more than a thickly accented, touristy “ni hao” or “xie xie.” I’m just trying to tell your daughter that the flashiness of saying “I can speak Chinese” can often blind people to the hard reality of the learning process. Any Wake Forest student can sit in a business class and learn how to turn a profit. It’s common sense with a some graphs, regulations, and trends to add the complexity that gives people the illusion that they’re being privy to some huge secret, when it’s really as simple as “spend money, make money” and “buy low, sell high.” If you are a competent Mandarin speaker, you can write your paycheck in any international job with an MNC. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.</p>
<p>I apologize for the long comment but I wanted to clear up some things. I’m also supposed to be studying for a Chinese test on Monday and I found this a lot more fun than that. I love Wake Forest more than anything, and I could not more strongly encourage your daughter to come here and take Mandarin. Put business on the backburner, if you want to do IB, as long as you have a few accounting/econ/finance classes you’re fine. I promise you it’s worth every bit of effort.</p>
<p>Go Deacs, Go Chinese</p>
<p>Xie xie indeed, mcbabysheep. We really appreciate your detailed answer - VERY helpful. We’ll know soon if WFU will give her an opportunity to take your advice. Enjoy Shanghai! How do you say “Go Deacs” in Mandarin?</p>
<p>Thanks! haha I really don’t know…closest you could probably get would be 前进执事们, which means literally “forward deacons.” Hope your college search goes well…it’s such an exciting time.</p>