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.