A prestigious Mandarin program

This is Qinghua, or Tsinghua University, whichever your prefer. Either way it’s considered the Harvard of China

I attended the 5th International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy today, here in Shanghai. I met some interesting people. I’ll introduce them to you later in the week, including through some podcast interviews with them.

One fellow I met today was John C Thompson, who is the resident director of the IUP program, otherwise known as the Inter University Program for Chinese Language Studies. This is, I think, the most prestigious Mandarin program in the country. It is run out of Qinghua University and administered by the UC Berkeley. The focus is on intermediate and advanced level learners of Mandarin who wish to take a very intensive program of study. These are often recruited from the top US universities and applicants require some very tough academic requirements. IUP accepts only 50 students per year. The student/teacher ratio on the program is 50 students to 28 teachers and for this the academic year program will cost you US $13,000.

John Thompson is a long-time learner/speaker of Mandarin and an interesting fellow with a varied career background. I hope to ask him into the CPod studio to talk about the IUP and other things.

Ken Carroll