漢語hanyu, 中文 zhongwen, 中國話 zhongguohua
Classes last for 16 weeks (see the academic calendar).
NB! The university transfers to a new study information system. This may cause errors in the course links that provide more detailed information. Should this occur, we kindly ask you to contact the coordinators of the college.
Click on the course to see the time-tables, course descriptions, requirements etc in the study information system.
You can find the schedule of the course in SIS II by clicking on the “Event” button under the name of the course.
Language courses on the basis of English:
- HVLC.08.012 Chinese for Beginners I, Level 0 > A1.1 (6 ECTS)
- HVLC.08.013 Chinese for Beginners II (on the Basis of English), Level A1.1 > A1.2 (6 ECTS)
Find the complete list of Chinese courses on our Estonian homepage.
The courses are generally free of charge for the students of the University of Tartu and for students from other Estonian higher education institutions (See which institutions and universities have a partnership with the University of Tartu).
Visiting students from foreign higher education institutions need to pay for their language courses only if they are fee-paying students at the University of Tartu. In case of the latter, consult with the foreign student office regarding the credit point costs and conditions.
If you have an active Study Information System (SIS) account, see how to register in SIS.
If you're not a student, see the information on prices and registration.
The University of Tartu is a partner of Eesti Töötukassa (Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund). Support for participating in training programmes is also available to people who already work.
With more than 1.2 billion people who speak Chinese as their first language, Chinese has the largest number of native speakers in the world. It is native to the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore and has a sizeable diaspora in Southeast Asia. Varieties of Chinese can be as diverse as an entire language family. The standardised form of Chinese is also called Mandarin or putonghua.
Written Chinese is easily distinguished by Chinese characters called hanzi 漢字. Each character represents either a word or a morpheme and is pronounced as monosyllabic. There are more than 60 000 Chinese characters, but knowing approximately 3000-4000 of them is sufficient to speak Chinese on an intermediate level.
Spoken Chinese uses mainly monosyllabic words with fixed word stress. Tones are used to distinguish words. While some dialects have only four tones, others can have up to nine tones. Noun words in Chinese lack both gender and declension and verbs don’t differentiate between tenses. Grammatical links are determined by word order and auxiliary words.
A person’s surname always comes first in Chinese names.