This course contributes to the achievement of the educational objective of the Course of Study in Foreign Language and Literature, by providing students with the necessary lexical and grammatical knowledge of Chinese Language, corresponding to level A1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Therefore, it aims at enabling students to acquire the fundamentals of Mandarin Chinese phonetics and phonology, morpho-syntax and lexicon, together with the basic knowledge of its writing system.

Expected results
Knowledge and understanding
By the end of the course students should be able to:
- understand written texts of elementary level;
- translate short sentences from Chinese into Italian and viceversa;
- translate short texts from Chinese into Italian and analyze them from a morpho-syntactic perspective;
- master the rules of Chinese characters stroke-order;
- read and write approximatively 500 words;
- understand elementary instructions and requests;
- understand and use numbers, expressions of quantity, price and time.

Making judgements
By the end of the course students:
- on the basis of the four linguistic abilities, should be able to describe and analyze texts regarding familiar and usual life.

Communication
By the end of the course students should be able to:
- simply introduce themselves and their daily activities;
- have an elementary conversation about topics related to familiar and usual contexts;
- simply introduce other people, saying where they live, what their job is , what their interests are, etc.