Beginning Chinese This course is an introduction to Mandarin (guoyu or putonghua). The course begins with simple words and phrases, the pronunciation and cadences of Mandarin, romanization, Chinese characters, and simple vocabulary items, all taught in the context of practical communication. Sentence patterns and other fundamentals of speaking, reading, and writing will be taught, including both traditional characters (used everywhere before the 1950s and still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and simplified characters (used in China). Students should have achieved active command of more than 600 Chinese characters and more than 800 compounds by the end of the sequence CHNS 0101, CHNS 0102, and CHNS 0103.

Beginning Chinese An intensive continuation of CHNS 0101, this course is required of those wishing to take CHNS 0103 in the spring.  Students may anticipate learning a significant amount of new vocabulary, sentence patterns and idiomatic expressions.  Skits, oral presentations, writing assignments, and cultural activities are also part of this course.

Beginning Chinese This course is a continuation of the fall and winter terms with accelerated introduction of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns designed to facilitate speaking and reading. Toward the end of this semester students will read Huarshang de meiren (Lady in the Painting), a short book written entirely in Chinese.

Intermediate Chinese This course is designed to enable the student to converse in everyday Chinese and to read simple texts in Chinese (both traditional and simplified characters). Discussion of assigned readings will be conducted primarily in Chinese. Familiarity with the vocabulary and grammar introduced in CHNS 0101, CHNS 0102, and CHNS 0103 is assumed. Grammatical explanations, written exercises, dictation quizzes, sentence patterns, oral drill, and online video and audio will accompany assignments. By the completion of CHNS 0202, which follows CHNS 0201 directly, students should be able to read and write approximately 1,200 characters.

Intermediate Chinese This course is a continuation of the first term's work, with the class conducted primarily in Chinese.

The Chinese Literary Tradition (in translation) This course, an introduction to the works of literature that formed the basis of traditional Chinese culture, is a discussion-based seminar. It focuses first on texts written in classical Chinese from the earliest times up through the Song dynasty, including selections from early poetry and history, Daoist classics, stories of the strange, and Tang Dynasty poetry by Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. These texts shaped the traditional Chinese understanding of the world, and provided models of what was perceived to be powerful, beautiful language.  In the second part of the course we will explore narratives written in the vernacular language, focusing on the literary significance and aesthetic value of drama, stories and novels long treasured by the Chinese. Students will gain a better understanding of traditional Chinese literary values, as well as Chinese society and worldviews.

Modern China through Literature (in translation) This course, taught in English, is a discussion-based seminar on some of the most significant works of short fiction, novellas, and novels that tell the story of China and the Chinese from the end of the Qing dynasty to the present. Students will gain a better understanding of the history of modern China by studying the works of literature that inspired readers and provoked debate during one hundred years of social reform, revolution, war, civil war, reconstruction, cultural revolution, cultural revival, and economic growth. Our reading will include work by authors such as Lu Xun (Diary of a Madman, 1918), Zhang Ailing (Love in a Fallen City, 1944), Ah Cheng (The Chess King, 1984), Yu Hua (To Live, 1993), and, from Taiwan, Zhu Tianwen (Notes of a Desolate Man, 1999). We will consider the mainstream (socially engaged realism), the avant-garde (varieties of modernism), and popular genres (romance and martial arts), and we will look for answers to the following questions: what has been the place of fiction in China in the modern era and what vision of modern China do we find in its fiction?

Women in Chinese American Diaspora Literature, 1950s-1990s In this course we will analyze literary works written about Chinese American women by Chinese American women in the second half of the twentieth century. A comparison of commercially successful English-language works, such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and works originally written in Chinese for an overseas audience in Asia, such as Nieh Hualing’s Mulberry and Peach, will be the starting point for investigating questions about who these narratives are for, how they shape the Chinese American identity, and how they reflect the intersections of gender, race, and language. Students will engage in multi-format discussion, written literary analysis, and peer review throughout the course. This course will be taught in English.

The Literature of the People's Republic of China (in English) In this course we will read a selection of significant short stories, novels, and plays published in the People’s Republic of China from its founding in 1949 to the present. We will begin with a look at the Maoist period and then study fiction and nonfiction that reflects on the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), experimental fiction, literary responses to the events of June 4, 1989, popular literature, environmental literature, women’s writing, stories from or about Tibet and Xinjiang, and science fiction. This is a College Writing course, and each student will write a draft and final version of a research paper, an analytical essay, and a creative work or translation.

Chinese Cinema This course, taught in English, surveys the history of movies in China since the 1930s and also offers an in-depth look at the work of: China's fifth-generation directors of the 1980s and their successors up to the present; Taiwan's new wave; and Hong Kong popular cinema, including martial arts film. Our focus is the screening and discussion of films such as The Goddess (a 1934 silent classic), Stage Sisters (1965; directed by the influential Xie Jin), the controversial Yellow Earth (1984), In the Heat of the Sun (a 1994 break with the conventional representation of the Cultural Revolution), Yang Dechang's masterpiece A One and a Two (2000), and Still Life (Jia Zhangke's 2006 meditation on displacement near the Three Gorges Dam). The course is designed to help students understand the place of cinema in Chinese culture and develop the analytical tools necessary for the informed viewing and study of Chinese film. We will look at everything from art film, to underground film, to recent box office hits. (No prerequisites) One evening film screening per week.

Hong Kong Cinema In this course we will survey Hong Kong films from the post-war period to the present. We explore the themes, styles, genres, directors, the star system, and audiences and discuss how Hong Kong cinema, as one of the largest and most dynamic motion picture industries in the world, expresses the region’s complex, hybrid, and fluid cultural identity in the context of coloniality and transnationalism.

Chinese Sociolinguistics (taught in English) Sociolinguistics is mainly concerned with the interaction of language and society. The language situation in China is unique both in the modern world and in human history. We will gain a good understanding of sociolinguistics as a scientific field of inquiry through exploring the Chinese situation in this course. Some of the questions we will ask are: What is Mandarin (Modern Standard) Chinese? Who are "native speakers" of Mandarin? Are most Chinese people monolingual (speaking only one language) or bilingual (speaking two languages) or even multilingual? How many "dialects" are there in China? What is the difference between a "language" and a "dialect"? Are Chinese characters "ideographs", i.e., "pictures" that directly represent meaning and have nothing to do with sound? Why has the pinyin romanization system officially adopted in the 1950s never supplanted the Chinese characters? Why are there traditional and simplified characters? We will also explore topics such as power, register, verbal courtesy, gender and language use. Students are encouraged to compare the Chinese situation with societies that they are familiar with.

Heroism, Humanity, and Historiography in China: The Three Kingdoms Beyond Warfare (in English) From the book of historical fiction The Romance of the Three Kingdoms to the video game Dynasty Warriors, enthusiasm about the Three Kingdoms period in China (220-280 CE) continues to the current day. In this course students will read 16th-century fiction to gain a broad understanding of the Three Kingdoms, a time period during which a long-lasting empire was divided.  Students will learn how premodern Chinese historians recounted and how the cultural elite and anonymous writers received and responded to the historical period.  By engaging with various forms of literary representation across East Asia, ranging from original historical records to modern movie adaptations, students will also come to understand the Three Kingdoms as an evolving cultural legacy with historical depth.

Advanced Chinese (Modern Chinese) This course aims at further development of overall language proficiency through extensive reading of selected texts representing a wide variety of subjects and styles. Classes will be conducted entirely in Chinese except for occasional recourse to English by the instructor to provide a quick solution to problems of definition. The main text will be All Things Considered with supplementary readings selected to help students both continue to work toward competence in conversational Chinese and also begin to master a more sophisticated register of language.

Advanced Chinese (Modern Chinese) This course is a continuation of CHNS 0301 with continued practice in conversational Chinese and a greater emphasis on reading works of a literary nature.

Traditional Chinese Poetry (in translation) Introducing the basics of Chinese poetics, this junior/sophomore discussion-based seminar explores inter-connections across a wide spectrum of Chinese poetry belonging to a vibrant tradition spanning more than two thousand years--folk songs; court rhapsodies; courtesan love poems; extended allegorical fantasies; ballads and lyric verse of love, war, friendship, loss, and separation. Landscape, travel, romantic and metaphysical poems by masters such as Qu Yuan, Tao Yuanming, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Dongpo and Li Qingzhao will be studied. We will analyze poetic expression ranging from poetic genres following strict formal conventions to relatively free-form verse. Traditional Chinese literary theories regarding poetry and its appreciation will be considered, yet students will also be encouraged to apply other critical approaches.

Clouds and Rain: Love and Sexuality in Traditional Chinese Literature (in translation) This seminar explores a spectrum of traditional attitudes toward romantic love, sexualities, men and women seen through the prism of classical Chinese literature. Fiction and drama will be the main focus with due attention to poetry. Texts to be analyzed include, e.g., pre-6th-century B.C. and subsequent poems; 3rd and 4th-century and later stories of strange romances; the remarkable 7th-century tale of the Dwelling of Playful Goddesses and early 9th-century love story of “Yingying”; the marvelous late 16th-century romantic drama, the Peony Pavilion; the hilarious late 17th-century erotic novella, the Carnal Prayer Mat; and selected chapters from novelistic masterworks such as the late 16th-century and early 17th-century, Jin Ping Mei, and the 18th-century, The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber).

Literature and Culture in Contemporary China and the Sinophone World (in English translation) In this course we will study select works of acclaimed, popular, and/or controversial short fiction, spoken drama, and poetry from the People’s Republic of China and the post-1949 Sinophone world, primarily Taiwan. We will devote some attention to other forms of cultural production, including film and visual art. We will place a particular emphasis on the study of work by Chinese and Sinophone writers and artists who belong to non-Han ethnic minority groups (e.g., Tibetan, Yi, and Atayal), and we will explore possible answers to the question, “How is Chinese national and cultural identity created and contested in literature?”

Documentary Film in Contemporary China (taught in English) In China since the 1980s, new political and socio-economic realities, along with new technologies, created conditions for the emergence of the New Documentary Movement, the collective achievement of a group of artists with new ideas about what the form and function of nonfiction film should be. We will screen and discuss select contemporary Chinese documentary films, all with English subtitles, place these films in the context of global documentary film history, and learn methods for the analysis of nonfiction film. We will “read” each film closely, and also study secondary sources to learn about the Chinese realities that each film documents. Taught in English.

Early Chinese Novels (in translation) This seminar focuses on pre-modern Chinese full-length novels, which rose and matured during the Ming-Qing period. Students will read from the "masterworks" of this genre, including Three Kingdoms (the epic deeds of heroes of the Chinese civil war of the second and third centuries), Outlaws of the Marsh (picaresque tales of Chinese Robin Hoods, as it were), The Journey to the West (a comic Buddhist-Daoist allegory better known in English as Monkey), The Plum in the Golden Vase (an erotic novel of manners), and The Story of the Stone-The Dream of the Red Chamber (widely recognized as a masterpiece of world literature); all are beloved and long treasured by the Chinese. We will also read an eighteenth century detective novel, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. We will not only trace the evolution of classical Chinese novels and consider their literary significance and artistic value; the course will also aim to provide a richer and deeper understanding of traditional China's history, society, culture, worldviews, beliefs, and sense of humor.

Advanced Readings, Conversation, and Writing (Modern Chinese) (in Chinese) This course is designed to improve students' competency in highly pragmatic Chinese, spoken and written. Readings and discussion will cover a wide variety of contemporary materials with an emphasis on linguistic preparation for study in China.

Classical Chinese I (in Chinese) This course is an introduction to wenyan, the written language of traditional China. In this course we will emphasize comprehension of the literal and metaphorical meanings of short wenyan texts. Our approach will include grammatical analysis and baihua translation (i.e., from the Classical Chinese into modern Chinese); discussion will be conducted entirely in baihua. This course begins the two-semester sequence of Classical Chinese, which not only introduces students to wenyan but also provides a vital learning experience for any student seeking to attain a high level of linguistic and cultural proficiency in Chinese, including modern written discourse.

Classical Chinese II (in Chinese) A continuation of CHNS 0411. In this course students will read a wide selection of wenyan texts that sample the classics of ancient Chinese thought, including Confucius' Analects, the Daoist texts Laozi and Zhuangzi, Mohist arguments against war, Sunzi's The Art of War, and Legalist writings on law. Students will also learn to punctuate wenyan texts (which were originally unpunctuated) and compose sentences or short paragraphs in wenyan. All class discussion will be conducted in modern Chinese.

Contemporary Social Issues in China: Advanced Readings (in Chinese) A survey of materials written in modern expository Chinese (academic, journalistic and polemical) that focus on the cultural, political, economic, and social issues of contemporary China. This advanced readings course is designed primarily for seniors who have already spent a semester or more studying and living in China or Taiwan. Emphasis will be given to further developing students' ability to read, analyze, and discuss complex issues in Mandarin while also advancing proficiency in writing and in oral comprehension. Oral reports and written compositions will be integral to the course's requirements.

Politics and Business in China: Advanced Readings and Discussion (in Chinese) The capstone course for those students who have attained a high level of Chinese language proficiency. The goal of this course is to help students improve their ability to read, write, and talk about politics and business in China. Most of this course will focus on recent and current debate and discussion in China over domestic political programs and policies, international relations, and business trends. Discussion will also touch upon the political and economic history of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. We will read articles intended for popular audiences in the Chinese-speaking world.

Senior Seminar on Modern Chinese Literature (in Chinese) A capstone course for all Chinese majors and for others who have attained a high level of Chinese language proficiency. Students will read and critique works by major Chinese fiction writers (and sometimes playwrights) and may also see and discuss a film or films from mainland China, Hong Kong, and/or Taiwan. All reading, discussion, and critical writing will be in Chinese.

Women in Chinese American Diaspora Literature, 1950s-1990s In this course we explore literary works written about Chinese American women by Chinese American women in the second half of the twentieth century. A comparison of commercially successful English-language works, such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and works originally written in Chinese for an overseas audience in Asia, such as Nieh Hualing’s Mulberry and Peach, will be the starting point for investigating questions about who these narratives are for, how they shape the Chinese American identity, and how they reflect the intersections of gender, race, and language.

Abner Zhang

Bingxiao Du

Carrie Wiebe

Chialan Sharon Wang

Dan Liu

Emma Auden

Hang Du

Kai Zhang

Katherine Wang

Keyue Song

Kun You

Mairead Harris

Priscilla Marie Downey

Shuching Huang

Thomas Moran

Wei Xu

Youlan Zhang

Read 135 reviews for Chinese courses at Middlebury College. Find the best Chinese professors and courses.  Discover your new major today!

I took this course because, as a freshman, I wanted to take advantage of Middlebury's language learning tracks and I had heard great things about our Chinese department. My high expectations were met and exceeded by Du Laoshi and He Laoshi, who co-taught Chinese 0101 in Fall 2025. Du Laoshi is clearly amazingly knowledgeable about learning Chinese as a second language and conducted class in a way that forced participation but encouraged mistakes. I grew to enjoy being cold-called on and found myself becoming more confident in my Chinese speaking despite my mistakes thanks to Du Laoshi's teaching style. 

You learn a lot in this class, but it’s a lot of work. The teachers are really supportive and understand how to teach Chinese in an effective way. If you’re taking this course, make this course your priority because it moves pretty fast learning wise. 

This course is so intense and hard and Wang Laoshi made it enjoyable. She is tough on grading but incredibly accommodating for late homework and other assignments. She puts a lot of effort to make sure every student is keeping up. That said, there is an insane amount of nightly homework, and around 50 vocab words per week. This class is a very big time commitment. But it is very fun and you learn a lot. My Chinese improved so much.