The Chinese Studies Program at Wake Forest University is one component of the East
Asian Languages and Cultures department.
There are currently three full-time teachers of Chinese: Yaohua Shi,
Fengyan Hu, and Patrick Moran. Recently we have also had the help of two native
speakers of Chinese as our teaching assistants.
We teach a full four years of Chinese language. During the first two years we teach
traditional Chinese characters. Because our majors and minors are required to spend
at least one semester in a formal language training program in mainland China or
Taiwan, we give students the option of using either traditional characters or
simplified characters during their third and fourth years. During the first two
years we teach over 600 Chinese characters, concentrating on those that are the most
often used in non-specialist Chinese texts. (See the official list.)
Out of these 600 character, less than 10% have a simplified version that requires learning
a new form. In practical turns that means that 15 extra characters (out of 150) need to be
learned each semester to be conversant with both systems of writing. Those 15 characters
amount to a little over one half of the character learning work required for one week.
