• Home
• Course Content
• Order & Subscription
• Resources
• About Us
• Contact Us

About Us

 
The development of this website and course material were initially funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Chinese is one of the world’s most widely used and important languages but it is still a less-commonly taught language. Many who want to learn Chinese do not have access to quality instruction. Chinese is also known to be a hard-to-learn language. Its difficult reputation scares away many potential students. Our mission is to do the following:

• To use technology to make the study of Chinese language more effective and interesting.
• To use the Internet  to make quality Chinese instruction available anytime, anywhere.
• To make learning Chinese a joyful experience and to make Chinese a common foreign language choice.

Dr. Der-lin Chao has more than 20 years of experience in teaching Chinese. She has taught at Princeton University, Middlebury College Chinese Summer School, Connecticut College, and Oberlin College. Currently she is associate professor of Chinese at Hunter College in New York City.

The following people made invaluable contributions to the website:
James Shiong-Ching Du: Chapters 1-7 and the Kangxi and Xinhua radicals learning tools
Yuhlan Cho: Chapter 8 and the website’s web master and designer
Pamela Weiss: 1,000 most-frequently-used characters learning tools, in traditional and simplified forms 
Weiyi Cheng: Exercises and activities for children.

Other people who assisted in creating the Web materials are:
Kevin Chan, Yu-ying Tang, Ming Chen, Raymond Lee, and Wilson Dong. 

The current project team includes: Der-lin Chao, Eva Shan Chou, Weiyi Cheng, Yuhlan Cho, and Pamela Weiss.

The next Volume of this course will focus on: the history of the development of Chinese scripts, standard handwriting, cursive handwriting, print fonts, calligraphy, and special characters. Volume 2 will be ready in 2005. The project team will continue to design new material to help students from different language backgrounds achieve literacy in Chinese. Watch our website for new developments.

We welcome your talent and ideas. If you are looking for an internship on a volunteer basis, have experience in designing Web pages, games or exercises, and would like to help more students achieve literacy in Chinese, please contact us.