Overview of Chinese Courses

1. Language Courses
2. Literature Courses
3. Distinguishing between Heritage Students vs. Non-Heritage Students
4. Course Planning for Non-Heritage Students Majoring in Chinese

The following table is an overview of Chinese courses. Please note there are two different tracks for all CHIN-titled courses — heritage and non-heritage. Students should register in appropriate tracks and levels according to their language background. To see detailed course description, please click on any course.
ALL incoming students wishing to take any CHIN, CNTO or CLCH-titled courses are required to take the Online Placement Procedure.

 


**PLEASE BE ADVISED: Students who do not attend classes in the first two weeks of term will be removed from the course**

DISTINCTION BETWEEN HERITAGE AND NON-HERITAGE STUDENTS:

By “heritage students ”, we refer to:

1. 1. • Students who were born in a non-Chinese speaking country, but was raised in a home where Mandarin or another Chinese dialect was spoken, who speaks or merely understands the dialect, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and Chinese.
      • Students who were born in a Chinese speaking country whose first language was Chinese.
      • Students of non-Chinese origin who have acquired certain level of Chinese language proficiency (especially speaking and listening) by living, studying or working in a Chinese speaking country/region for an extended time.

By “non-heritage students ”, we refer to:

1. 1. • students of non-Chinese origin, or
      • students of Chinese origin who do not speak any Chinese dialect, and whose parents do not speak any Chinese dialect either.

Suggested Course Plan for Non-heritage Students Majoring in Chinese

According to the Department of Asian Studies, the major of Asian Language and Culture requires 42 credits, of which at least 30 must be from courses numbered 400 or above.

Those 42 credits must include:

Between 12 and 18 credits of upper-division credit in one language taught in the Department of Asian Studies, which must include at least six credits at the 400 level ( if Chinese is the language of specialization, CLCH 389-399 (2 terms) is required; in the case of South Asian languages, 12-18 credits of upper-level courses in Sanskrit-Hindi-Urdu or Sanskrit-Punjabi are required).

Students with little or no prior knowledge of the language they wish to focus on may be required to earn up to 24 credits in that language before they take any 400 level language courses. However, they will still be required to earn 30 upper-division credits in addition to those 24 lower-division credits.

This may end up to 54 credits and requires careful and timely plan for you to graduate in time. In order to help our non-heritage students who want to major in Chinese, we provide the following “suggested course plan” for their reference: Blue indicates lower division credits.

Note: Students who transfer to UBC from other colleges may need one more year to complete the required credits, because their two years of college language courses typically count for only one year of our equivalent UBC intensive courses.