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.

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