High Intermediate Chinese II

Catalog description

This course is a continuation of 0500 and further develops students’ advanced Chinese language proficiency through the study of more complex grammatical structures, expanded vocabulary, and formal registers. Students deepen their understanding of contemporary Chinese society, culture, and everyday life since China’s economic reforms and opening in 1978 by engaging with economically, socially, and politically relevant topics, including obesity, the Five-Year Plans, population aging, infrastructure development and ethnic minorities, 5G technology, study-abroad policies, the Hong Kong issue, e-commerce, and the history of Sino-foreign cultural exchanges. Adopting a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, the course uses a wide range of authentic materials—such as bilingual news articles from The New York Times and other media—to promote multimodal learning. Students also learn to use AI-based tools responsibly and effectively, including machine translation, optical character recognition, speech recognition and synthesis, and large language models, to support continued Chinese learning beyond Penn.