Before STARTALK, Bobbi Timmerman ’26 didn’t know any Chinese.

Timmerman, a mathematics major and physics minor from Aiken, South Carolina, was one of 25 high school and college students who attended this year’s STARTALK, Wofford’s free four-week summer language program, which concluded on June 27.

“I have never learned so much in four weeks in my life,” says Timmerman. “From day one, you are totally submerged in the language.”

Funded by the National Security Agency to increase the number of American students studying critical-need foreign languages, STARTALK at Wofford is a full Chinese immersion experience. Students receive daily language instruction from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and classes are conducted almost entirely in Chinese. Cultural activities such as traditional watercolor and ink painting, calligraphy and Chinese yo-yo are held in the afternoons.

The rigorous curriculum focuses on developing functional Chinese language skills and applying that knowledge to real world situations, according to the program’s director, Dr. Yongfang Zhang, associate professor of Chinese at Wofford.

By the end of the four weeks, students who had never studied Chinese before can carry out basic conversations, participate in everyday interactions and recognize and type Chinese characters. As an added incentive, participants receive four college credits from Wofford upon the successful completion of the program.

"A lot of people think Chinese is hard, but you’ll realize that it's so easy if you give it a try. The grammar is easy; the sentence structure is easy. There are some sounds that are phonetically different from English, but that's part of learning any foreign language," Zhang says.

Timmerman, who took Spanish as a first-year student, agrees. “There are no tenses or conjugations to learn or grammatical genders to figure out,” Timmerman says. “It’s very straight forward.”

Timmerman is already studying Chinese 102 independently with Zhang this summer at Wofford and plans to pursue a minor in Chinese.

“I ended up really enjoying and loving Chinese,” Timmerman says. “It’s one of the best languages I’ve ever learned and one of the best language classes I’ve ever taken.”

She and other participants showed off their newly learned skills at the STARTALK Final Showcase held at the Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts. Over Chinese take-out and bubble tea, students demonstrated yo-yo tricks with names like waterfall, whip and gunslinger while videos of language lessons played in the background. Paintings depicting lotus flowers and mountaintop temples were also on display, as were digital books that students created using Book Creator.

“Since its launch in 2006, the NSA STARTALK grant has played a vital role in supporting the teaching of less commonly taught and critical languages in the U.S., and it has supported our 11 programs since 2013,” Zhang says. The NSA has canceled funding for next year, but Zhang says she’s hopeful the program will be reinstated.