The BLCU Campus

In this post I will discuss most of the places of interest for study abroad students at BLCU. First, let's start with the campus map:

There are 3 gates from which you can enter and exit BLCU: East gate (东门), West gate (西门), South gate (南门). The South gate is the main entrance for campus and the only gate through which cars can go through. If you turn to the right after entering from the South gate, there is Student Dormitory No. 4 (宿舍四号楼), Hope cafe (which is attached to Dorm No. 4), Student Dormitory No. 1 (宿舍一号楼 － primarily for scholarship students), and a small convenience store (便利店 － located in the back alley between Dorm No. 1 and Dorm No. 4). If you go even further past Dorm No. 1, then you can find the campus bookstore (出版社), which has pretty much every book published by the BLCU press for sale (it is a very extensive library). Hope Cafe is a good place to get a decent burger or a western breakfast if you are getting tired of eating at the dining hall all the time. It stayed open relatively late (12am or 1 am I think) and was a little overpriced for the quality, but the convenience of being right next to Dorm No. 4 was a huge plus. Hope cafe also has free wifi inside the building and outside where tables are set up so many students go there just to hang out or study. There is also a small pond located in front of Dorm No. 4 with tables and seats and its a great place to hang out when its not cold outside. The convenience store is a great place to get snacks and drinks if you don't want to go all the way to the grocery store outside. It had everything from cookies, chips, drinks, flavored yogurts, etc. Prices were about the same to the grocery store outside campus which was great. 

If you turn left after entering the South gate, you will find the Cafeteria (食堂) and the Library (图书馆) on opposite sides of the street. The library is not a great place to study because students there are pretty loud, but there is a good bookstore on the 2nd floor that has a lot of books for the HSK (汉语水平考试 － the Chinese equivalent to the TOEFL). The Conference Center (会议中心) is also located right behind the library, and this is where some foreign students choose to live in. The Cafeteria has 5 levels, with the first 2 having very cheap food that is a little bland, and this is where most of the native Chinese students eat. You definitely need a meal card to get food there and that can be made in an office on the 2nd floor of the Cafeteria. The 3rd floor has a lot of different options and Chinese dishes that you usually get at restaurants. This is usually made to order and a little more expensive than the first 2 floors, but still very cheap (~10-15 RMB for a full meal). There is also a hot pot restaurant on this floor. The fourth and fifth floors have actually restaurants there with food that is very decent but relatively expensive (~30-50 RMB). There is a Japanese restaurant on the 4th floor and a place where you can get Peking duck on the 5th floor, but I'd recommend going to one of the many popular restaurants in Beijing for real Peking duck. If instead of going into the Cafeteria and rather walking around it, you will find the Muslim restaurant (穆斯林餐厅). It is a great place to get authentic Xinjiang food, which is incredibly tasty. It is usually very busy and definitely a little pricey but it's worth checking out. A lot of Muslim students go to eat over there because it is the only place on campus where you can find halal food.

The main building in the area of the East gate is Classroom Building No. 1 (教一楼) which is where you will most likely have all of your classes. It is a massive building with lots of classrooms and offices. The important spots for most people will be Room 107 located on the first floor to the right of the main entrance, which is where the people in charge of international students are located. They take care of visa issues, passports, tuition & fees, etc. so if any issue comes up they will be the best equipped to handle it. I should also not that on the 2nd floor of the Yifu Building (逸夫楼) which is located between Classroom Building No. 1 and Dormitory No. 1, there is a Visa service that takes care of your residence permit and visa issues without you having to go all the way to the embassy, but you will need the approval of the teachers in room 107 before they will do anything for you regarding the visa. Every class has a 10 min break in the middle and most students go down to the 4th floor because there is a canteen where you can get drinks and snacks and there is a large balcony where a lot of students like to hang out and chat. There are also other class buildings in that area, but I think those were only for the native Chinese students and I never knew of anyone having a class there. There is also a ICBC bank/ATM located in the building behind Classroom Building No. 1 which is where a lot of students receive their scholarship stipends. 

The area around the West gate has a lot of things around it. First off, Dorm No. 17 is located right outside of the West gate and its where most of the international students not on scholarship live. As you enter in from the West gate, there are a lot of dorms located to the right, but most of these are for the native Chinese students. The only ones I can think of that I know foreigners lived in are Dorms 7, 8, and 9. Dorms 7 and 8 were very nice and were all single rooms. I think it was one of the most expensive dorms to live in on campus. Dorm 9 was mostly for female students on scholarship and the girls that lived there said it was just as dirty as Dorm 1 (which is extremely dirty). There is also a store, a few cafes, and other miscellaneous services located in front of Dorm 9. The store over there is like a mini grocery store and they also carry school supplies. You can also buy a cell phone or an electronic dictionary over there but I highly recommend going outside to Zhongguancun or some other place because you can get one much cheaper over there. There is also a barbershop, laundry service, and photocopy place located all in the same block. As you enter the West gate, to the left you have the Post Office and the Cernet office. The Cernet office is where everyone on campus goes to get their internet setup. If you go a little further, you will see the volley ball courts, gym, and track field to the left and the basketball and tennis courts to the right. I feel that the gym on campus overcharges and I personally recommend to go to the gym in UTSB (科技大学) since it is far superior in facilities and membership can be much cheaper (refer to my previous post about this).

That's pretty much all I have to say about the campus, and I hope this was thorough enough. This was originally supposed to be a video tour, but due to my camera being broken, I could not get the footage uploaded to my computer. Please feel free to send any questions my way.

*** For photos of a bunch of the places I talked about here, visit the BLCU Blog's photo section.

Classes at BLCU

My first installment will be about the academic side of my experience and how my experience was at BLCU. As a new student you have to start the year by taking a placement test to gage your appropriate level. The placement test was a model of the HSK (chinese version of the TOEFL) and since it was my first time ever taking that sort of test, I thought it was very hard. I got placed in the lower intermediate level (中级上), which was for students with a vocabulary of 1500-2000 words. At the beginning I felt that I had to look up a lot of words, but this was actually very beneficial to me because it increase my vocabulary much faster but it was not too hard to the point where it took me forever to do homework.

Classes were 20 hours a week with 6 hours for the comprehensive class (综合课), 4 hours for listening & speaking class (听和说课), and the other 10 hours were divided for elective classes. I took grammatical analysis (语法分析), speaking (口语课), and chinese culture (中国文化). Other electives offered at my level included a newspaper reading class, calligraphy, business chinese, listening, writing, and more. At the higher levels, these classes get even further specialized into advanced topics like translation, politics, real-world listening, and many more. Needless to say, there is definitely plenty of chinese to learn at BLCU and the classes are very practical to everyday life in China and the vocabulary you learn throughout the semester is extremely useful. Teachers took attendance each day and if you miss over a third of class time over the semester, you cannot sit for the final exams and fail the class, so they were relatively strict. Students who had perfect attendance received  a certificate at the end of the semester.

Teachers at BLCU are extremely knowledgeable and very experienced. They were easily the best Chinese teachers I had. Many of them are actually authors of the books that we studied out of and those are the same books used in other universities around China and the rest of the world. They really knew how to teach foreigners the intricacies of the Chinese language, and amazingly knew what sort of challenges students from each part of the world have in learning the language due to their native language's phonetics and grammar. The books we had were great too and the lessons and vocabulary were geared towards daily life, current events, and idiomatic expressions. At the beginning of the semester, each class starts out with different vocabulary lists, since the topics covered are different, but by the end of the semester, a lot of these words end up repeating in other classes which really help ingrain a lot of important words and characters in your long-term memory, which is essential for learning languages. The goal for the semester was to have 3000 words in our vocabulary, but I feel that that number is underestimated and if you really learned all the words you come across, you could easily know 4000 to 5000 words.

Class time was mainly spent on a lesson from the book. In our comprehensive class we covered about a lesson a week since those were longer. Other classes usually had a lesson per day, but lessons were shorter. Teachers would try to quiz random students to make sure everyone was paying attention and they had some kind of a sixth-sense when it came to attention. It always seemed like the second your concentration slipped, they would call on you to answer a question. I made sure that I had a lot of practice in speaking since that was one of my major weaknesses going in, so a lot of my electives had oral presentations each day or powerpoint presentations. Homework usually consisted of exercises from the book, which in some classes were turned in and in others were just gone over during the next class period. It usually took 2 to 3 hours to complete, and if you didn't do it you not only got very behind but also lost class participation points. Teachers made sure to let us know that learning chinese is a grind and that you have to put in dedicated work on your own time each day if you want to achieve a true level of fluency. Most of my homework came from the comprehensive class, and in the span of a semester we wrote five 400 to 500 character papers and prepared a 10 min presentation for class.

Each class had 1 to 2 midterms and a final exam. Midterms were usually non-cumulative, but finals were cumulative. Depending on the class the tests were either written, oral, or presentations/papers. Tests were very fair and if you kept up with class and did your homework, it was relatively easy to get an A.

Lastly, I wanted to mention the most useful class I took at BLCU, and surprisingly it was my grammar class. It helped me in all aspects of the language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In one semester we covered a book which was split into 2 parts that started from the most elementary grammar and ended with the most complex grammar in the entire language. By the end of the course, my ability to know when something "sounds" right in Chinese improved immensely, and thats what helped me a lot with each aspect of the language. Though the work was tedious and class was sometimes boring, I did learn a lot in that class, and I'd recommend anyone to take it at the intermediate or advanced levels at BLCU.

Guide to Settling in at BLCU

Now that I've been at BLCU for over a month, here's a list of things that I would advise newcomers to do in order to get adjusted as quickly as possible. You can make do just fine without most of them, but they are very useful:

- Internet: Most people on campus use Cernet (office is just before the West Gate). The monthly fee is 140 RMB for unlimited usage, and there are other options available (50 RMB for 40 hours and 100 RMB for 120 hours of internet). If you are registering for the first time, bring at least 250 RMB with you because there is a 50 RMB deposit, 50 RMB "installation fee", and 10 RMB for the ethernet cable on top of the first month's fee.

- Electronic Dictionary: Very helpful in learning and reviewing Chinese vocabulary on the go. A lot of the Korean and Japanese students use them in class, but if you get one that is small enough to fit in you pocket, it will allow you to learn characters that you encounter in everyday life on signs and flyers at a much faster pace. Dictionaries can range from 300 RMB to 2000+ RMB. They are available at the Friendship store, but I would advise you to go in a group to Zhongguancun and bargain for dictionaries. It will save you lots of money.

- Cell phone: Can get these at the Friendship store and pretty much anywhere in Wudaokou. The most basic phones are 200 RMB, and it is pretty much up to you on how nice of a phone you want. A SIM card is provided at registration, so all you need to buy is a phone and a card with minutes. Minute cards range from 30 RMB to 100 RMB. It takes of 1 RMB per minute of calling time and like 0.25 RMB for outgoing texts. I would advise to text more than you call to conserve minutes. Also, if you get your phone unlocked, you can just plug in the SIM that BLCU gives and buy a minutes card and be set to go.

- Bike: Not an absolute necessity, but it comes in very handy and allows you to get to places much faster. You can get used ones for a little over 150 RMB but I advise getting a newer one just because you'll have fewer problems. Also you can usually sell your bike to used bike vendors and get some money back. There is a Giant dealership across the street from the East Gate, which is where I got my bike for 350 RMB. (on a side note, a lot of people here get battery-powered motorcycles, but they are much more expensive, about 3000 RMB)

- Water tank: About every dorm on campus sells a big tank of water for 15 RMB. There is also a guy outside of Building 1 that sells it for 12 RMB. The first time you buy water, you have to put down a 50 RMB deposit, and you will need to buy a water pump, which my Dorm (Building 4) was trying to sell to me for 40 RMB. The guy outside Building 1 sells the same exact pump for 25 RMB. It is also important to note that once you buy from the building or other vendors that you have to go back to the same vendor for a new tank once you finish it. They will not accept someone else's tank. I recommend getting a water tank because it is much more economical in the long run than buying a 1.5 L bottle for 3 RMB every time you run out of water.

- Transport card: Cuts down bus fares from 1 RMB to 0.40 RMB, but subway fares still remain at 2 RMB. Card can be bought from any subway station in the city for 20 RMB and the minimum amount you can put on it the first time is 20 RMB.

That's all I can think of for right now. These few things have really been very useful over the past month, so I thought I would share this with all of you. If there is anything else you would like to know, please feel free to comment.

First Week

This update's been a bit overdue, but I had to go through a lot of trouble to get internet over here and I've been swamped with work, so I haven't had much time to update the blog while I was settling in. The first week was very busy. I went through a whole day of registration, and the next day I had a placement test to judge which level I would be placed in. The test was pretty hard and I didn't know a lot of words on it, but I was placed in the lower intermediate level (中级上), which corresponds to a student who has studied at least 2000 words, so I felt it was the right level of difficulty.

Classes move very quickly here and a lot of the students in my class spent last year in BLCU studying Chinese as well so they are a step ahead of me. One of the main challenges for me is catching up on all the words that were introduced in the lower level books to these students, as the books I used in the US had a totally different set of vocabulary. One of the things I really like about BLCU is that it is very international, and there are people from all over the world over here. Most of them know some English, but the best way to communicate is through Chinese, which is great because it only gives you that much more practice. My Chinese was not as good as I thought it would be this time around, but I've already made long strides in the short time I've been here. I can easily carry on a 5 min conversation with a local and that has really bumped up my confidence in speaking Chinese. The problem for me is not in understanding what is being said, but it is in speaking and putting words together on the spot. I just met with some Chinese BLCU students studying English and made them my language partners, so I am really going to do my best to improve my spoken Chinese.

Outside of classes, I've been doing my best to explore the area around my university and I have found that BLCU is in a great spot and there are a lot of restaurants and shopping centers near campus. I also got a 5 month membership to a pretty nice gym about 10 min away from campus on a bike for 500 RMB, which was a great deal. The gym was a major training facility during the Olympics in 2008 and they also give you free personal training sessions. Stuff here is cheap by western standards but you still have to keep your eyes on your finances to balance it out because it is very easy to overspend or get suckered into paying a higher price. One thing to remember about China is that unless you are in a big department store, almost no price is set, so you always have to haggle and bargain your way down. And if they don't bargain, they will flat out tell you, but it never hurts to try.

I am planning to post a video up on Youtube showing a tour of the BLCU campus. I will also try to update this blog much more regularly.

Peace out

The journey is about to begin...

In a little over a day I am going to leave my home in Atlanta for a long journey to Beijing (nearly 18 hours). I have yet to pack my stuff, but I am not too worried as I am trying to take the bare necessities that I won't be able to find over in China because a lot of things are readily available in China. I am going to study Mandarin Chinese in China for about 5 months, and I will leave Beijing right after the Chinese New Year in early February. I started this blog in order to record some of my experiences in China and to provide students considering to study abroad in China a resource on how they can make the most out of their trip.

This is going to be my second time in Beijing, as I went to study at Tsinghua University through a program at my university back in the US last summer for 8 weeks. I had a great time over there and really saw my ability to pick up Chinese accelerate, so I'm hoping to continue advancing my proficiency in Chinese while seeing some parts of Beijing that I missed out on last time. I have been studying Mandarin Chinese for the past 2 years at my university, so I do have a decent background in speaking and understanding the language. I know I can get a lot better, and I'm hoping that by the end of these next 5 months, I will be able to carry on a conversation with a native Beijinger almost as fluently as I can communicate in English. It's going to take a lot of hard work to get there, but I feel confident in my abilities to pick up the language, and the fact that I already have a solid foundation in the language, I will really be able to accelerate my proficiency much more quickly than someone starting from scratch.

I will be studying at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) in their Chinese Language program. It is located very near Tsinghua University, so I will be very familiar with my surroundings which will be nice. I didn't get to see much of BLCU's campus last summer, but I did go there a couple of times to play volleyball. This experience is going to be different though because I won't be going with 50 other kids from my university. That was really helpful last time because we were able to get really close to each other, explore the city together, and share a lot of the experience of being in a very new environment and setting. This time around I am pretty much going to be on my own, and I won't really be able to use English as a crutch to communicate to people because my classmates at BLCU are more likely to be from other non-English speaking countries, so that is a plus in some aspects. I am pretty excited to create my own experience this time rather than have my experience create for me through my university's program.

Finally, I want to mention a very important resource for anyone considering to study abroad anywhere in the world: MAKE USE OF SCHOLARSHIPS!!! Studying abroad can be very expensive depending on the country you are going to, and that deters so many people from trying to go somewhere new, but through the use of scholarships, you can really make things much easier for yourself in making a study abroad experience possible. I was fortunate enough to receive the Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship this summer and it is really the main reason I am able to go on this trip, so I would definitely recommend anyone to look into it in order to make your trip financially possible. I will also try to upload videos weekly to my Youtube channel, so do check on that to get a glimpse of what I am doing in China.

So ready or not, here I come Beijing! Feel free to leave any comments or questions about studying or living in China in the comments section below. You can also contact me by email (link is in my bio). That's it for now and I will catch you guys on the other side of the Pacific.