Founded in 1980, theDepartment of Foreign Languages is one of the earliest-established departments of HFU. It offers four undergraduate specialties: English, German, Japanese and Korea and two cooperative specialties: German (economy and trade – oriented2+3) and Korean (2+2). Since 2007, over 100 students of the two cooperative specialties have studied in Germany and over 200 students in South Korea.

The department has a staff of 55,among whom more than 60% have experiences of studying or working abroad.Each year, the department sends teachers to cooperative universities home and abroad to promote their professional competence.In the meantime, experts and professors from the prestigious universitiesare invited to expand the visions of students in various ways.

The department has a Language Training Center including seven language labs: one Simultaneous Interpreting classroom, one translation workshop for teachers, one Computer-Aided Translation lab and two situational classrooms. The reference room provides plentiful English, German, Korean and Japanese books, among whichthere are 23,000 Japanese books donated by Japanese Science Society.

Sticking to the university's school-running principle, it lays much emphasis on students' language using and cross-cultural communication abilities. Rich extracurricular activities are provided for these aims. The students achieve high score in such examinations as English TEM-4 and TEM-8, German PGG and PGH and Japanese NSS-4 and NSS-8, Japanese-Language Proficiency Test and Korean-Language Proficiency Test. The students of the department have gained prizes in various competitions, such as nation-wide “FLTRPCup” English writing, reading and speech contest, National Spoken English Competition, Japanese Essay Competition, “Tichuan Cup” Japanese Language and Culture and Japanese Essay Competition,National Japanese Speech Contest (Central China), National “Germany-China-hand-in-hand” UrbanizationVideo Clip Contest, “Chaori Cup” Japanese Speech Contest of East China, Korean Speech Contest of Anhui Province and National English Competition (Anhui Province).Two students were awarded Anhui Top-Ten Students and another two students were chosen as torch relay bearers in Athens Olympic Games and Beijing Olympic Games respectively.