Effective field theories of the strong interactions based on the approximate
chiral symmetry of QCD provide a model-independent approach to low-energy
hadron physics. We give a brief introduction to mesonic and baryonic chiral
perturbation theory and discuss a number of applications. We also consider the
effective field theory including vector and axial-vector mesons.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, proceedings of "Many-Body Structure of Strongly
Interacting Systems", Mainz, Germany, Feb. 23-25 201
