Universities for learning Chinese = waste of money?

[johndones]

As all schools Chinese universities are slow too. Each semester is 4 months （at least where I'm studying) and there's 6 levels (7 depending on how you count), so that it would take a total of 3 years to complete the whole curriculum, which itself is a little limited. So most people would need 1 more year after those 3 to be relatively fluent.

They have split classes into listening, speaking, reading, extensive-reading and writing which is ok, but the problem is that a lot of vocabulary from those classes overlaps. Reading is always the class that introduces new vocabulary, listening and speaking most often just recycles it (about 20-30% new) and extensive-reading and writing is not about learning vocabulary in the first place, so you might pick up something new, but not too much.

As Chinese grammar is very simple after some time it's all about cramming the new vocabulary in, so it's better to have a private tutor focus with you on that.

I do attend a Chinese university, but I have been studying by myself too, so right now after about 8 months of studying I will be joining a 高一 class which is the 5th level (1 more to go).