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.

Language Partners

One of the key reasons I was able to improve my Chinese outside of the classroom so quickly was because I made a few language partners, and luckily at BLCU they are extremely easy to find. The majority of native Chinese students at BLCU are there for learning English, since it is a language university, and they are all very eager to find a native speaker of English to help them improve their spoken English or help in editing papers. They in turn are also willing to help you with your Chinese and can be extremely helpful in making you fluent in Chinese, especially if they are very picky about the errors you make. The pickier the language partner, the better you get at Chinese. Sometimes teachers don't point out errors you make in class just to get on with the lesson, so language partners are the key in polishing your language. What you need to avoid is just speaking in English to them all the time, especially if you are a beginner in Chinese that will be your strongest tendency. The best thing to do is set days to meet up for lunch or dinner, hang out for a few hours, do homework together etc., but alternate the days you use English and Chinese for fairness. It is important to note that it is much more rare for your Chinese language partner to speak to a native English speaker, so you definitely have to be mindful of that and give them enough practice in English.


So how do you go about finding a language partner? It's extremely simple: just ask. Even if you aren't at a language university where most students are not language majors, a lot of them still want to be good at English since they see it as an extremely important skill for employment later on, so it is very easy to make one. You can literally go up to random students in the school asking if they study English and want to be language partners (语伴: yǔbàn). If you are shy or uncomfortable with randomly approaching people then try to find the English department at your university and ask if they have students that need language partners to practice English. In the best case scenario, you two will become friends and you can get to learn even more about Chinese culture while sharing your own. They are also very helpful in knowing where to go for traveling and its very interesting to hear their thoughts on the current state of China and their opinions of the West. It is very easy to set up and it will be huge in improving your Chinese and your understanding of China. 

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.

Apologies

Wow, so I totally failed in updating this blog, but I do have my reasons. The Great Firewall of China blocked my access to blogger and my hard drive had to be wiped clean, so I lost my VPN client and could not find a way to download it again. Every other VPN client I tried was too slow and I tried posting a few times, but it would never publish and get stuck, so I quit trying after a while. In addition, I have been waiting for my video camera to get back, as it had all of my vlogging footage, but it malfunctioned right at the end of my trip, and I had to take it to the camera's flagship store in Beijing and they shipped it back in February, but it never arrived and was either stolen or lost on its way over here. So sadly I won't have any youtube videos to show.

But that was all the bad news. Good news is I had an incredible time in China. I have been back in America since February but have been insanely busy since I got back. I have been wanting to write on this blog for the longest time, but I just never had a stretch of time where I could consistently write until now. I took a lot of notes while I was in China and over the next few days I am going to recount my whole experience on here and make it as detailed as possible since the experience is still vivid in my memory. So be prepared for the tale, and in summary my experience was something like this...