After four months of preparation and refinement, the Confucius Institute of the University of Macau will officially launch a new Chinese characters online course in September 2020. At the beginning of this year, the Confucius Institute began to collect feedback from students on their learning needs. After analyzing their feedback, it is apparent that more than 40% of students would like to learn Chinese characters, and the Institute decided to launch a new project on Chinese characters teaching. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face classes were suspended and have to be held via online means, the Institute found a few advantages with online courses including students having the flexibility to decide when and where to learn the course content, and they can learn at their own pace. Thus, the Institute decided to develop an online course on Chinese characters.
The online course is composed of two parts, the first part is an introduction to the basics of Chinese characters and the second part is the teaching of commonly used Chinese characters. The introduction will cover topics including the formation of Chinese characters, radicals and strokes. Each lesson will teach about 7-8 Chinese characters and the duration of the lesson will be about 15-20 minutes. The course will be offering to students who are currently registered to the 1st semester, Academic Year 2020/2021 Mandarin courses and hope to receive constructive feedback from students to optimize the course for future development.
For full version, please read the Chinese version.