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Foreigners who want to study Chinese
Wednesday, April 6, 2005-10:59 AM
Advice for foreigners who wish to study Chinese while in China: If possible, audit a class for one lesson before paying for it.
The month long HSK training class I wanted to take was cancelled because of low enrollment. Instead they had two semester long evening courses I could take if I wanted.
Natasha and I walked to the university after dinner Monday evening. On the classroom doors we saw two registers each with about twenty students' names and across from each name the student's home country.
Natasha noted that if they had this many students, they should have been able to find the minimum number of students (five) for the HSK training class.
The problem was that turn out was a fraction of enrollment. That evening there were two classes, beginning and advanced. The beginning class had three students. The advanced had two.
I sat in on the advanced class for one hour. During that hour, the teacher reviewed under twenty vocabulary words using a method I've seen before in China: reading the word several times with students, defining the word, and demonstrating how to use the word in as many different contexts as the teacher can think of.
Natasha and I figured class costs around fifty renminbi per student per hour. That's far too much for that kind of instruction.
An alternative I recommend if you want to study Chinese in China is to find a student you can trust and pay him or her twenty to fifty renminbi per hour for personal instruction.
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