Hey Everyone,
I've been in China for over a week now! Time seems to fly by pretty fast. All in all, orientation week was pretty much awesome. I learned a lot of things about China and met some pretty awesome people. My Chinese has also been improving bit by bit. I definitely have to update this on the weekend or something. I'll at least tell you all about my classes right now though!
I'm taking the Intensive Chinese track with Alliance. I was pretty nervous about it since...well, it sounds pretty scary. There are actually quite a lot of students from all over the US here though. So we took a placement test last Friday to determine what level would be best for us. There was a written part and an oral part. The written part has a bunch of parts like any Chinese test I've had, such as listening, grammar, fill in the blanks, composition, etc. I didn't do too well on that. It was definitely difficult because I would understand all but one or two characters in a sentence and I would have to skip it or hope I was using it right. The oral part was....Well, I'm a bit nervous with my speaking part since I'm not too good at speaking. So it was a bit difficult. They get you to talk in Chinese about different things like yourself and your classes.
Since I've had four semesters of Chinese, I was correctly (wishful thinking?) placed into the 300 level. Although I know some people who studied for awhile and got placed differently. It really depends on how your school's Chinese program is. And the teachers definitely make a conscious effort to put you into the right class. I've seen people move around quite a bit the past couple days.
For classes in general, they're a bit....hard? I don't know what they would be otherwise. We start at 9 in the morning Monday through Friday. There's a dictation part where we have to write the characters for what we studied for that day. Then we begin class. The classes are about an hour each. So we have grammar class, then drill 1 (which basically drills us on everything we learned in grammar class). Then there's drill 2 class where another laoshi takes over and we usually have a topic to talk about or go over. It's still about the same things as the first classes, just more independent speaking. Then we break for lunch! (We usually all go out together and grab food somewhere or go to a restaurant). Or we might have Chinese language table where we have food together with some teachers and chat in Chinese.
After lunch, we start the Intensive Chinese class with our third teacher. It's a whole different book with it's own vocabulary. There's a lot of emphasis on the oral part (as is the first part but moreso in the second part). But we definitely need to know all the characters and we study all that on our own time. Depending on the schedule we might have a one on one with a teacher after everything. So far, it's kind of a free-for-all type of deal where you can talk about anything. It gets you use to talking with Chinese people. And the teacher also corrects you so you know what's up and what to pay attention to when you're outside a class setting.
Overall, the classes aren't too bad. It's actually pretty nice to have small classes. The teachers will correct you immediately if you say something wrong or if your tones are struggling.....It's a bit hard to get use to still but it really helps. We're all expected to speak in Chinese like all the time. It's so hard especially when you don't know how to say/describe something. And since we have a Chinese roommate, they speak Chinese with us too and it helps because they're just students and don' have that teacher relationship with us. But the teachers here are awesome too and we can talk with them and text them and everything.
After classes, I've had to spend a lot of time doing homework... It's way more intense than any Chinese class I've taken. It usually takes me a good while just to finish a few worksheets, read things, and study all the characters. It gets pretty tiring between studying, sleeping and attending class. Doesn't seem like we'll have too much free time during the weekdays. I feel like I'm being lazy already just by writing this blog post and not studying more. Ah~
Anyways, ask me any questions! I'm sure I missed out on the class life somewhere~
Thomas
