Studying (Kima)
Some people have asked me how I learn and how I go about studying and the simple answer to the latter is that I don't very much. In terms of classes, I have four different classes this semester (next semester is a complete new start) and I'll tell you how each of them is taught. They are all taught in Chinese and are all classes rather than lectures.
First up I have 刘老师 Liu laoshi, nicknamed Mooncake, who teaches us "Chinese comprehension". He mostly teaches us vocabulary by going through all the words in his book split up by noun, adj, verb etc. and putting them in a few phrases or sentences which he types into PowerPoint and then makes us recite everything. We'll then get a match up sheet with the characters, pinyin (latin alphabet pronunciation guide) and the English, and a fill in the blank sheet which is really difficult. The next class we'll have a writing test where he'll recite the words and we write the characters. Then we'll look at the texts (usually two) and spend ages reading them out loud and looking at all the grammar points in them and he'll give us words which we have to put into a sentence to say out loud. Then we'll get homework which is usually scripting a conversation or monologue to perform next class. Mooncake is a very happy guy who smiles a lot and got his nickname because he gave us mooncakes during the Midautumn Festival.
Next is 高老师 Gao laoshi, a.k.a. Tiger, who has us for speaking and listening. In her class to learn vocab we just chant the words over and over again which isn't very effective. Then we'll do various things like seeïng words that relate to each other and how, and filling in the blank and match up the two halves of the sentence, but they're all much easier because they all have audio so you're hearing what you're writing and very useful because they get make you connect the character to the pronunciation. Then we'll hear short dialogues and answer questions about them, and at the very end there's a long dialogue which we have to recite. These are tough but manageable when I pay attention and we get to see the dialogues after so we can understand where we went wrong. Our homework will either be the same as Mooncake's - writing dialogues - or memorising sentences and paragraphs, which I disagree with. On the whole I think she has the most effective teaching style. She does love ChatGPT and not only permits, but recommends us to use it, which is ... interesting.
At the start of term, 徐老师 Xu laoshi really annoyed me because he would never speak a word of English and would spend ages explaining our vocabulary to us, in Chinese, using synonyms we obviously wouldn't know and writing a myriad of words on the board which he was just thinking up on the spot without telling us the English for any of them so he was impossible to follow. He also said "对吧" duiba alright a hell of a lot of the time so that became his nickname. Also, despite him being our "reading and writing" teacher, we never did much of either at all. As my Mandarin has improved and his rambles have become more intellegible, he's grown on me and I quite like his explanations of all our vocabulary. He has an unbearable obsession with punctuation and he makes us come up and write the characters on the board in front of the whole class, and then he'll tell you how your 直 was too fat or your 口 didn't have sharp enough angles or you wrote the first line of 重 right-to-left instead of left-to-right. All of the texts in his class were so odd, the first was about an American student finding a Chinese girlfriend, the second was a waiter thinking someone asked for 扣肉 kourou braised pork instead of 可乐 kele cola and the third was about language change and how 小姐 xiaojie started off meaning older sister before morphing into prostitute and 同志 tongzhi originally meant comrade before it meant homosexual (prostitute and homosexual are two of the only English words he's ever said). He's altogether not a great teacher but he was cheery and straight up peculiar enough that I didn't mind his class too much once I understood him.
All three of these teachers had a lot of overlapping vocabulary which was helpful as we had less to study and none of them got close to finishing their textbooks the entire term. Duiba only got through the first four lessons!
Our last class is "Culture class" with 冯老师 Feng laoshi. We've done things like go to the Tianjin Museum, the school museum, and studied and recreated dialogues from Chinese cartoons. We have also been rented out as test classes for the student teachers who have a massive range of engagement. While we do fun things in her class, 冯老师 annoys me a bit.
I do really enjoy all my classes and I have wonderful classmates who I get on with well.