Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a sequence of language courses available at Stuyvesant. Students learn to understand, speak read and write in modern standard Chinese. There are tracks for both native and non-native Mandarin speakers, as well as a full-year AP course for students from both the native and non-native classes who have completed the sequence. For non-native students who desire to take another year of Mandarin Chinese without taking the AP course, Conversational Mandarin (FM7-FM8) is available.

FM1-FM6
Mandarin Chinese for non-native speakers typically begins with an introduction to the Chinese writing system and tonal pronunciation aided by pinyin, a romanization system for spoken Chinese syllables. Once the basics of pronunciation and writing are covered, several units of vocabulary are introduced. The first year covers subjects such as greetings, family members, school subjects and classroom objects, clothing and shopping, and body parts/physical description. Later terms of Mandarin introduce basic elements of Chinese culture and geography, including major cities and regions of China, Chinese holidays and traditional foods. grammar is woven throughout the curriculum and new structures are introduced in each unit.

Ms. Guan
Ms. Guan teaches from the textbook and from a series of handouts for each unit that students are expected to print out from the class website. Classes are spent reviewing sets of vocabulary words and grammatical structures from the handouts and sometimes competing sets of translation or fill-in-the-blank questions as a class. On some days Ms. Guan has volunteers read dialogues aloud from the textbook, gives students time to practice with classmates, and then selects another pair of volunteers to perform the dialogue. Tests occur about once a month, and quizzes are given about once every two weeks. Homework is usually given weekly, and consists of translation questions from the textbook and/or compositions of about 100-150 characters each. Group presentation projects are sometimes assigned at the end of the term. In FM6, much of the class is devoted to reviewing for the Regents exam, and the usual activities may be replaced with reviewing past regents exams and practicing speaking and composition questions for the Regents.

Ms. Yang
Ms. Yang focuses more heavily on speaking. She often has students create surveys or interviews and walk around the classroom conversing with other students in Chinese to obtain the answers to the questions. Students are also given a large packet of grammar and a new page is reviewed weekly (more frequently as the final exam approaches). There are usually a number of projects each term, which may be short skits and decorated/illustrated pieces of writing such as letters, invitations, or advertisements. There are tests at the end of each unit, and quizzes nearly every week. However, quizzes tend to be fairly easy and usually consist of matching characters in a list to their meanings.