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CET Hangzhou summer


Andrew987

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I attended CET Hangzhou. Before studying in China, I studied two years of Chinese at my university in the US. Everybody's background is not the same, but our university's Chinese program did not focus on speaking very much. We did lots of translations, grammar exercises, listening dictation, etc. So even though I felt I was excelling in the US , when I got to Hangzhou it was very difficult.

I should also mention I only attended the Hangzhou summer program, not the full semester, which might be organized slightly differently. During the summer, there were three levels of students, beginning, intermediate and advanced. Each level class had it's own primary book. Every day we did a new lesson from the primary book. The first hour introduced grammar and important vocab, the second hour was practice drills to use the new content. These two primary classes had about 5 students in my group, I think the other levels were about the same.

The next two hours were electives. I chose newspaper/media for the first class and business for the second. Here I should note I absolutely never looked at any material for these two classes outside of class. Preparation and homework for the primary class took all my time, but maybe other students could handle this differently. The media/newspaper class actually had nothing do with the reading the newspaper or watching the news. We watched videos with a short 5 minute scenario and basically worked on our listening comprehension. Afterward we discussed what we saw, which was an opportunity for guided discussion. I didn't realize the value at the time, but I've gone back to look over that book and materials. It is a very good book for studying spoken chinese, because it's filled with colloquialisms and everyday speech that you don't normally get from the basic textbooks. At the time though, I honestly didn't understand much of it, so I just tried to practice listening and participated as best as I could in the class. The business class was hardest class I took there. Even though I've got a business minor from my university in the US, the business Chinese grammar is very similar to newspaper/formal written grammar. Since I had no exposure to that type of Chinese up to that point, this class was almost a complete waste for me. I think they chose a very difficult book to use in that class. It wasn't introduction to business chinese, they seemed to assume since I was in the intermediate level in the primary class, I was also an intermediate level business chinese student, which I definitely wasn't. But honestly, the electives were not all that important and I think the other students and the teachers felt that way. Just do your best was their basic expectation. I don't think either elective even had tests. So that should tell you something.

Finally after lunch, we had a 30 minute one-on-one session four times a week. Every Friday was a test, so there were no electives or one on one. The one on one was OK, but I didn't make good use of it because I wasn't sure what the teacher wanted us to do. Basically, I think we were supposed to use all the grammar patterns and as much vocab as possible from that day's lesson to retell them that day's story. This seemed too difficult to me because it didn't seem like natural speech, just me trying to recall things. Anyway, they are flexible on this so, if you have some better method, you can probably do whatever you want.

I would go Hangzhou instead of Beijing. I think most of the good study abroad programs (PIB, IUP, CET, ACC) all use the same methods, i.e. new lesson every day. Hangzhou is in my opinion a very laid back, but modern city. Very open minded, modern people. Lots of western-style facilities available, but without as many westerners as you find in Beijing, Shanghai. Good food, tea houses, Chinese medicine are all have root in Hangzhou. I know you can find that everywhere in China, but Hangzhou has some unique history in these areas.

OK, let me tell a few bad points about Hangzhou or at least advantages of studying in Beijing. First, I believe the CET Hangzhou program is the shortest of all the summer study abroad programs. It is only 6 weeks, the others are about 8 weeks I think. The pace is pretty brutal and I was so happy for it to end just to get a chance to absorb all that information. That's a problem I think you will find at all of these study abroad places, there is no "review time", to time to absorb what you're learning. They just keeping giving more and more and in the end you forget a lot. That was my feeling.

Other bad things, Hangzhou in the summer might be the hottest place on earth. Some days I showered two or three times a day. It's sooo hot. Shanghai gets a nice breeze to cool off the temps, not Hangzhou. It's hot, it rains, it's hot, it rains. I liked the rain because it wasn't hot when it was raining, but afterward it's very humid.

Finally, Hangzhou/southern china accent. This wasn't a big deal in the summer, because we barely had time to get out among local people. In a full semester, I image the pace might not be as fast, and you might get more chances to get out. Don't worry, it's very easy to understand, instead of sh/ch/zh, it sounds more like s/c/z. To me this isn't important, but Chinese people feel any deviation from standard putonghua is just wrong. Personally I feel no perfect pronunciation exists, and this is just some idea that was drilled into them during early education. Hangzhou-hua is very noticeably not standard, so many Chinese people will tell you that. It won't have any effect on you ability to learn Chinese. If anything, southern style is more clear, less er-hua.

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I should make one clarification to the above post. I said the media/newspaper elective had nothing to do with watching news or reading newspaper. True. However, our primary class was divided into two halves. The first half all the lessons were dialogs, so the grammar and vocab were more spoken chinese-style. The second half, all the lessons were newspaper articles, so the grammar and vocab were more formal/written style. So, to be fair, we were exposed to Chinese newspapers in some form.

In addition to all this, we also were given a topic once a week to go out and interview Chinese students. Then we were supposed to give an oral report in class to give our results. I'm not sure if many students actually went out to interview 3 -4 Chinese people. You could easily just make up a report and no one would know. Finding Chinese people willing to be interviewed was really time consuming and difficult. I found Chinese people willing to be interviewed, but honestly didn't understand half of what they told me. Some people used english to answer which defeated the purpose. But it was a good excuse to walk up to random chinese people and start a conversation.This alone is more intimidating that it sounds.

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