Chinese at the University of Mississippi:

This program offers courses which may be used to constitute a major or a minor in Chinese language. The University of Mississippi has the only college-level Chinese program in the state.

MA Initiative for Language Teaching Assistants (MILTA)

MA Initiative for Language Teaching Assistants (MILTA)

Intensive Chinese:

Students wishing to achieve an Advanced level in speaking, comprehending, and writing Chinese by the completion of their undergraduate studies will be interested in the intensive Chinese Language Program. This program is part of the National Flagship Language Program, sponsored by the National Security Education Program. This program provides financial aid for on-campus intensive summer courses as well as summer study abroad in China. A separate program application is required.

For More Information about Intensive Chinese:

For more information and to apply for admission to the Chinese Flagship Language Program, please contact:

Chinese Flagship Language Program
Department of Modern Languages
The University of Mississippi
P. O. Box 1848
University, MS 38677-1848

Telephone: +1-662-915-7298, Fax: +1-662-915-1086
E-mail: mldyer@olemiss.edu

About Chinese:

Chinese, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family, is a language used by over one billion people, nearly a quarter of the world’s population. About 70% of the total Chinese population speaks "Mandarin," the major dialect of China, as their mother tongue. People in China or Taiwan who speak other "dialects" as their mother tongue understand and speak Mandarin with no problem as long as they have had basic education.

Why Study Chinese?

Speakers of Chinese not only live in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, but also spread throughout Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe, where large Chinese communities congregate. Chinese people today have been playing increasingly important roles worldwide. Learning Chinese will be not only a means by which you can fulfill your foreign language requirement at most universities, but also an extraordinary and agreeable experience through which you can immerse yourself in a different culture. Unlike most languages, Chinese has a unique ideographic writing system, which provides visual comprehensibility. The grammatical structure of Chinese is not only logical, but also pragmatic, related to the particular way of Chinese thinking. Knowledge of the written language opens up the culture of one of the world's oldest civilizations. Traditional Chinese culture, from Confucianism and Chan Buddhism to martial arts and Chinese cuisine, has an enormous influence on East and Southeast Asian nations. Chinese culture has also greatly inspired the western world through Marco Polo, G. W. Leibniz, Max Weber, Franz Kafka, Andre Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound, and Luis Borges, among others. The People's Republic of China currently boasts the fastest growing economy in the world and is widely regarded as the potentially biggest global market in the twenty-first century. Proficient speakers of Mandarin Chinese will find jobs in various fields such as business, government, international relations, information technology, tourism, education, translation and much, much more. Of all foreign languages at American universities and colleges, Chinese shows the highest proportional increase in enrollment. How difficult is it to learn Chinese ? Learning Chinese requires as much effort and hard work as learning any other foreign language. However, Chinese grammar is simpler than the major European languages. Chinese has no inflection based on person, tense, number, gender and case. There is no need to memorize verb conjugations or case endings. It is context and word order that determine grammatical relationships. After two years of study (in three-hour credit courses), one should be able to handle simple communication with basic grammar and vocabulary. Beginners may find the writing system of Chinese unfamiliar, but since the characters are formed from a relatively small number of components, once you have mastered the basic characters (as well as the basic components), the rest will be simply proliferation and rearrangement of the previously learned components. The study of characters is part of the joy of learning Chinese.