Learning Chinese

Most people know that Mandarin Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker, and this truly is not an understatement. But people who have not studied Chinese in China can't truly grasp the true difficulty of the language. Chinese characters are thought to be the hardest part, but I am here to say that though it is definitely not easy to learn characters starting out, the hardest part is actually the pronunciation and getting the right tone for each word while speaking. Chinese is one of the few languages that has 4 distinct tones to each syllable, and mispronouncing the tone for a given word totally changes the meaning of what you are trying to say. For example, its common for a beginner to mispronounce "excuse me?" when trying to ask a question to a stranger (请问, qǐngwèn) and say 请吻 (qǐngwěn － "can I please kiss you?"). Although it is a funny mistake, it can lead to a lot of misunderstanding when talking to native speakers outside of the classroom. Tones were something I completely ignored when I was studying Chinese in the classroom in America and only when I went to China was when I realized the importance of the tones. On top of that certain words are only used when speaking (口语) and other words are only used in writing (书面语), so there are a lot of words that have the same meaning but depending upon the circumstances you are using the word under, you can't interchange them otherwise the usage is incorrect.


This brings me to my main point, which is that Chinese cannot be learned anywhere other than in China. Its true when people say that a language is not learned in the classroom, and that it is when you apply it in real situations is when you truly start learning, but what I mean is that for Chinese it's an absolute necessity. Students studying European languages like Spanish and French in the US can definitely gain a pretty good grasp on those languages within a couple of years just because the grammar and words are so similar to English, but the fact that Chinese is so different makes it nearly impossible to get an advanced level of proficiency and fluency without at least a year or more spent studying and living in China. I recently saw an interesting graphic that lists a few languages and ranks them by difficulty for English speakers, and it was no surprise to me that Chinese was ranked one of the hardest, requiring at least 2,200 class hours to reach proficiency. That's 90-110 weeks (about 2 years) of 20-25 hours of class of just Chinese every week. That's why taking a class in college that only gives you 5 hours of class time per week is never going to get you very far in Chinese.


From my own experience, I recommend students to first build a solid foundation in Chinese before packing up to do an intensive language program in China. You should have about 2 years of Chinese instruction at your university before going because your learning in China will be much more accelerated. Much of the beginning of learning Chinese is getting used to characters and pronouncing syllables, which no doubt would be learned quicker in China, but your time would be used much more efficiently if you went to China with an upper elementary or intermediate level. For example, some of my friends in China had not learned a word in Chinese before starting school and attained a proficiency level in a semester about equivalent to mine sometime towards the end of my first year in Chinese, but living in China was much harder for them as they did not know the language well enough to get around and caused a lot of frustration for them in the beginning. In my case, I had taken about a year and a half worth of Chinese before going this time and my vocabulary literally tripled while I was there. I went from knowing between 1200 to 1500 words to over 4000 words. The level of fluency of my Chinese by the end of my trip was better than some people who had finished Chinese majors in America. And all of this happened in 1 semester. I can't imagine how good my Chinese would have been had I stayed even longer. Once you have a basic knowledge of at least 1000 to 1200 words and some grammar structures then learning Chinese becomes a bit easier and you learn at a much faster pace. In closing, if you are serious about getting good at Chinese, definitely plan to set out at least a semester to a whole year of your time to study in China, but wait until you have at least 2 years of Chinese under your belt.

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.

Working out in Beijing

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently signed up for a gym outside of campus at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing (UTSB) because the gym at BLCU was quoting a price that was nearly 300 RMB more expensive than the place I am at now, and they were not budging at all. Pricing on China is very dependent on 2 things: the number of people signing up together and the length of time you are going to get a membership for. People who signed up for a whole year could get memberships that are maybe 100 RMB more than the price for 5 to 6 months. They will not just divide a year's membership in half and give you a membership. Luckily, I ran into a guy named Guo who worked for the gym I am going to these days. I was able to negotiate with him to give me a 5 month membership for 500 RMB which was by far the cheapest I could get in the area, and the gym itself is massive. They have a huge swimming pool, basketball courts, badminton courts, ping pong courts, an outdoor track, and a weight training facility.

The weight training facility doesn't have as much equipment as an American gym but it definitely has enough to get a good workout in. A good thing about gyms in China is that a trainer is included in the gym membership and yesterday I got one to help me out with an ab workout. He made me do some very interesting exercises that I had not seen before, but I definitely felt the burn in my midsection. It seems like a lot the Chinese are like Americans with working out, as in there are very few people that come regularly. I am one of the very few foreigners that come to the gym and I definitely get some very curious stares, especially because I also one of the strongest people in the gym. Random Chinese guys come up to me and start asking me advice on how they can start lifting as much as I do. I remind them that it takes consistency and that I also started at the same weights they are currently lifting. One thing I have noticed is that the Chinese are very welcoming and open once they see that you are making an effort to speak to them in their language. Using English here doesn't get you very far in doing anything and preference is given to those who speak the language more fluently. It seems that everyday I am reminded of how little Chinese I know, even though I have studied it for the past 2 years, which is why I've been making an effort to talk to as many Chinese people as I can. We'll see how far it get as time goes on.

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.