All public universities to offer Chinese language course

Pakistan-China Institute in Islamabad with the collaboration of University of Karachi’s Latif Ebrahim Jamal National Science Information Center is launching courses on “Basic Chinese Language” under the supervision of Professor Attaur Rahman, Professor Iqbal Choudhary and Senator Mushahid Hussain in all public sector universities of Pakistan through video-conferencing.

The main objective of the programme is to impart basic Chinese language to Pakistani students which will help them in their future lives, particularly in view of the key role that China is now playing in the world economy and in science and engineering. This course has been designed to help undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate students across Pakistan in basic sciences, applied sciences and social sciences to develop their language skills.

The courses will be transmitted through the video conferencing facility being coordinated through the Latif Ebrahim Jamal National Science Information Center (ICCBS) and COMSATS (Islamabad) with the collaboration of Chinese language experts at the Confucius Institutes of Chinese Language at University of Karachi and the Confucius Institutes of Chinese Language at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Islamabad. There will be two parallel training programmes that will start from February, 17, 2014. Programme 1A will be on the afternoons of Mondays and Wednesdays (2pm to 4pm), while the Programme 1B will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays (2pm to 4pm).

This basic Chinese language programme meets the needs of students across Pakistan for a term of four months. The Chinese language experts at the Confucius Institute at University of Karachi and at Islamabad will deliver lectures with their Chinese knowledge both in language and culture. The course will start from the very basic Chinese language, Chinese phonetic transcription, strokes of Chinese characters, simple Chinese sentence patterns, simple Chinese grammar, simple conversations in different language situations, and some of the Chinese cultures. The Chinese language experts will put all the basic Chinese language and culture together step by step when they do their teaching in order to improve the understanding of Chinese language for the students in Pakistan and they will have basic Chinese language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing at the end of the course. Students who successfully complete the course will be awarded certificates.