WE ARE STILL ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THE 2009-10 ACADEMIC YEAR!
The Department of Asian Studies' FALCON (Full-year Asian Language CONcentration) Program enables beginning students of Mandarin Chinese or Japanese to study in a concentrated and uninterrupted manner over a period of time long enough to gain working proficiency. Participants have ranged from qualified high school students, undergraduates who plan careers in East Asia, graduate students with specializations involving Chinese or Japanese, to professionals outside the academic world who need a strong foundation in the language for their careers, or because they plan to live in a Chinese or Japanese-speaking country. A number of students who pursue degrees in Asian Studies, whether at Cornell or elsewhere, do complete FALCON, and they find it to be very useful for their academic pursuits. It's especially helpful for people who will need to reach a high level of proficiency in Chinese or Japanese but who have not studied it before. To pursue graduate work in the language, you would definitely need to continue your studies after FALCON. But the advantage of FALCON is that you would be able to do so largely on your own, using the understanding of the language that you gained here.