Chinese (Mandarin) is normally studied from beginner's level. You’ll study the Chinese language, country and culture through a range of lively options. This includes modules that explore Chinese history and literature, from the earliest times to present day. You’ll achieve a high level of communicative skill, and to further increase your career options you can take a final year module to help you develop translation and interpreting skills. You’ll have access to our excellent language resource centres which have: internet access, audio-visual facilities, computer-aided language learning software, course-related books, materials and periodicals. This ensures that you will have a broad range of options to help you increase your language understanding. Linguistics is the study of natural language. It covers the study of language structure (grammar), the study of meaning (semantics) and the social functions of language (sociolinguistics). This course will equip you with the tools for analysing language and for conducting your own research. You’ll discuss the immense power that our language has to construct and to constrain meaning. We’ve recently launched several new modules which draw on contemporary research. This means that you will be studying the very latest developments in clinical linguistics, media discourse and child language acquisition. You don’t need any prior knowledge of grammar, foreign languages or technical terminology to study this course.