Objectives:

The minor in East Asian Studies provides well-qualified upperclassmen the opportunity to develop a secondary field of expertise in a discipline of vital national interest.

Administration: The minor in East Asian Studies is supervised by a Steering Committee that consists of one representative from each of the constituent departments within the minor. Each department will choose its representative on the Steering Committee. In consultation with the committee, the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences will appoint one of its members to serve as overall Director of the Minor. The Director and the Steering Committee will meet at least once each semester (fall and spring) to plan activities related to, and set appropriate policies for, the minor. The Director will have primary responsibility for administering those activities and policies, will serve a term of three years, and may be renewed by the Dean for an additional term with the advice and consent of the Steering Committee. Directors will submit annual reports on the minor to the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Prerequisite: Because Chinese is the only Asian language offered through 202 at The Citadel, registrants for Japanese and Korean (Category IV languages by the Defense Language Institute’s scale of hours required for mastery), must have completed the core requirement in Chinese (Category IV language), French, German, or Spanish (Category II languages).

Competencies, Knowledge, or Skills to Be Achieved in the Language Courses:

The intensive-introduction sequences develop basic practical communication through standard cognitive-code methodology. Daily study and practice of phonetics, orthography, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, idiom, and culture cultivate the four skills critical to foreign-language mastery: aural comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and composition. By the end of the course, the diligent student will be able to converse intelligibly in general social situations, recognize and reproduce the phonetic alphabets and most-used characters of the pictographic writing systems, comprehend the gist of simple texts with the aid of a dictionary, and write brief summaries of those texts.