Playing Catch Up: Chinese Update

This whole summer I told myself I would review everything I learned in my first year of Chinese classes and that I would get ahead so coming back after summer wouldn't be hard. I never managed get myself to open a book about Chinese, so I was really nervous about coming back to it.
I got in this weird funk over the summer, where I didn't really do anything with languages, so I definitely wanted to turn that around.

I was really pleased when in the first lesson I still was able to say the things the teacher asked us to say and that I hadn't forgotten everything. In fact, I wasn't even the worst off in the class, which was reassuring. That said, I realized, and keep realizing every day, that there are some very important characters I've forgotten how to write and that I can remember how to say a lot of words, but I can't always recall the tone.

The first week I worked really hard reviewing grammar points that were a bit foggy, practicing any character I couldn't quite remember, and generally studying a whole lot. It's now the beginning of the third week and I feel like after just two weeks back into it, I'm back to where I was at the end of last year and I've already improved a little bit. I wanted to talk about what I've been doing to learn and re-learn all the stuff we've done so far, and what I've been doing to get ahead and prepare myself for my year abroad next year.

Each week for my Chinese course, we have 7 hours of classes, which is about double the normal amount of contact hours. That allows us to have a lot more listening and speaking time and generally get a lot more exposure per week. It does mean that getting an hour of studying in for every hour of class is hard. I do try to keep that up, though, because otherwise it's impossible to learn all the characters.

Three of the classes we have are focused on the textbook. We go through the dialogues in the textbook and go over written exercises. I honestly don't get much out of these classes. I don't often learn a lot of vocabulary or grammar in these lessons. We are asked to prepare the dialogues and exercises ahead of time, so I make the most progress in my own time.

One of the classes we have is a speaking tutorial. Our tutor isn't very focused, and we're one chapter behind in that tutorial from the rest of my classes so it also feels like a waste of time. Speaking practice is really important, so it's a shame the classes aren't smaller and more efficient.

One of the classes we have is a grammar lesson. Our teacher presents a grammatical point that we're going to learn and then teaches us the structure by dictating example sentences a few times and then writing them up on the board. This is good listening practice and is a really effective way of learning the grammar. The example sentences also tend to have new vocabulary that is different from that in our textbook, so we often learn useful words. The homework we have to do for this lesson is turn in a copy of all the sentences, which are to be handwritten in Chinese with no English or pinyin. They are then marked for how well we write the characters. So this lesson is great because it covers listening, grammar, vocabulary, and character writing.

Lastly, two of the classes we have are called lectures. Our teacher will play a recording of a dialogue a few times, so we practice listening and trying to understand. Then she plays the dialogue one by one and has us repeat after the recording. Then she passes out a transcript in Chinese only of the dialogue and we repeat after the tape (yeah, it's an actual tape) a couple more times. This repetition-heavy method I think is quite a traditional Chinese way of learning and I quite like it. I get a lot out of these lessons because there is often new vocabulary that I can go home and learn. Also, the dialogue will contain whatever grammatical structure we're studying that week, which is really helpful in cementing the patterns in our heads.

Last week in one of these lessons, we went through a text, which I thought was quite advanced for us, but was easy enough for us to be able to get through it. I learned a few grammatical particles and a lot of vocabulary. It also gave me inspiration and motivation to take texts and go through them on my own, look up words, and try to understand it. I did this with one of the texts from the optional Chinese class I don't take, and I got through it. I hope to keep doing this because it was a great activity for building vocabulary and reading comprehension skills.

I was warned by a friend who is on his year abroad that the one gap in the Chinese department is reading comprehension, so I've been trying to work on listening a lot more. You can't exactly get very far in a conversation if you can't understand what the other person is saying. Plus, I think listening exams are more common in China. It was a useful heads up, so I've been doing the listening exercises in the workbook that comes with my textbook. Those have been challenging, but I'm ok at them as long as I can listen a few times. I'm also trying to listen to more music in Chinese. It's a great way to get used to the sounds of a language and a nice thing to play in the background when I'm studying Chinese. Here is a link to the playlist of Chinese music I'm currently enjoying.

I'm overall pretty pleased with the course, which is pretty much the same as last year, and I'm glad I didn't lose too much over the summer. I hope to keep up this level of work for the year, because the more work I put in and the more I improve this year, the easier my year in China will be. The pressure is definitely on to become as close to fluent and literate as I can in the next year. It's also a lot easier to work hard when I know it's all going to pay off.