Computer assisted instruction in Chinese is considered in relation to the design and recognition of Chinese characters, speech synthesis of the standard Chinese language, and the identification of Chinese tone. The PLATO work has shifted its orientation from provision of supplementary courseware to implementation of independent lessons and experimentation with computer technology for Chinese. The Chinese characters have to be specially designed and referenced because it is not possible to associate an individual symbol with a key on the keyboard. Since the characters are composed in the correct stroke order, they can be used to teach the student how to write each of them. A program has been developed that can recognize a test sample of 150 hand-drawn characters. The user writes a character with a finger on the screen, pausing between strokes. Seven possible strokes and the numbers associated with them are identified. The input stroke pattern is searched in the database of stroke patterns for the best match. The synthesis program takes prestored or typed-in strings in Chinese pinyin, converts them to Votrax phoneme and pitch codes, and then routes the codes to the synthesizer for speech production. A pitch extracting device constructed locally and interfaced with PLATO has been used in an experiment on automated recognition of Chinese tones. The hardware modifies the input wave form and counts the length of time between peaks. The time is stored in the memory and then sent to the PLATO computer for processing. Since Chinese is a contour tone language, the shape of the tones is taken into consideration in the identification process. (SW)