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)
Click below to obtain information on Scholarships Available for the MA Degree at the University of Mississippi!
Intensive Chinese:
Undergraduates wishing to achieve Superior proficiency
in speaking, comprehending, and writing Chinese will be interested in the Chinese Language Flagship Program.
Funded by the National Security Education Program, this program provides financial aid for on-campus intensive
summer courses as well as summer study and a capstone year in China. A separate program application is required.
StarTalk Program in Chinese!
For More Information about Intensive Chinese:
For more information and to apply for admission to the Chinese Language
Program, please contact:
Chinese Language Flagship 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 live not only in China, Taiwan, and
Singapore, but also throughout Southeast Asia, North
America, and Europe, where large Chinese communities
congregate. Chinese people today have been playing
increasingly important roles worldwide. Learning Chinese is
an extraordinary and agreeable experience through which to
immerse yourself in a different culture. Unlike most
languages, Chinese has a unique ideographic writing system
that provides visual comprehensibility. The grammatical
structure of Chinese is not only logical, but also
pragmatic, and is 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 the nations of East and Southeast
Asia.
The People's Republic of China currently boasts the fastest
growing economy in the world and is widely regarded as one
of the most important global markets 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. Beginners may find the Chinese writing
system unfamiliar, but since the characters are formed from
a relatively small number of components, once you master the
basic characters (as well as the basic components) the rest
is simply a matter of the proliferation and rearrangement
of the previously learned components. The study of
characters is part of the joy of learning Chinese.
