Eric's Beijing Diary

Started a new language immersion class again. Slowly but surely, I am getting my arms around this language. I emphasize "slowly," because I have been studying Chinese for almost five years now. The problem, of course, is that I have never been able to study language full time. In some ways, that is good, because, if you are not in a hurry, slow learning is generally better than fast learning. The reason for this if you try to learn in too much of a hurry, you generally have to do a good bit of unlearning down the road. At any rate, the lady in charge of placement talked with me for about 20 minutes in Chinese, and decided to start me in Book 3. That's certainly better than starting at the very beginning, but it still says, "Elementary" on the cover. No matter. This book is not hard, and I can genrally read my way through a chapter in about a day, rather than a week, like the book I have been using.

I am going to Sinoland this time. It's a little more expensive than the previous school I went to, but this school limits class size to no more than 4 students, and follows the "80-20" rule pretty strictly. That means 80 per cent of class time is spent on actual conversation. Over the past five years, what has evolved is a system whereby I go to class for two or three months, then spend many more months studying on my own. If you are going to class for two or three hours a day, you should spend at least another two to four hours studying the material. I just don't have time to do that. So I take the class for awhile, then study on my own for awhile. I have spent my entire adult life developing self-teaching methods. I prefer self-study, because it is generally much more time efficient. But that efficiency begins to diminsh when the material you are studying reaches frustration level. So I try to strike a balance between classroom learning and self-study. When it comes right down to it, that's what any student has to do. We'll see how it goes.