Intensive Language Study in China: Your Options

The rise of the China in the world economy has prompted business and financial interest in the country.Chinese culture, which is easily the equal of any great culture in the world, has attracted a great deal of interest throughout the world. China’s major cities are very much like the great cities of the world: people from all over the world come to China. The inexpensive price and economic possibilities are a powerful magnet to those from lower-income areas, such as Africa and central Asia. For those who speak English fluently, there are professional and cultural opportunities that may not be available in their home country.

The Chinese language, and the broader Asian language groups that resemble it, present a problem for Westerners and, broadly, for those whose native language is a phonetic language.A phonetic language, very simply is one with “letters” that when grouped together form “words”.These words have a sound that derives directly from this grouping.If you learn these letters – there may be 26 of them, or 50 of them, they may be written from left to right or right to left, or top to bottom, or diagonally, but however many there are you can learn "words".Chinese and those related languages are nothing like this.The written Chinese language is based on memory, on the notion of visual recognition. When you encounter a character, which is comparable to a syllable in Western languages, you either recognize the character, or you do not. Cultural immersion and study go a long way to language learning

“Study” in china usually involves enrollment, payment of tuition, and an official letter that qualifies for a student visa. Private schools and business schools may be fairly flexible, but public universities are not. The term usually begins around the beginning of September and in late February, and the term typically lasts four months, roughly 16 weeks.Intensive classes are four hours per day, so when the student arrives late for class enrollment, this means that quite a bit of material has been covered.

One advantage of coming to China is that, if you accomplish this process on your own, intensive Chinese study in China is fairly inexpensive. Tuition and books at major universities is rarely more than $1500 per term. Food is quite inexpensive, so the other issue is housing. A Western style single bedroom apartment or a single dormitory room, furnished with TV, often with a kitchen, perhaps a washing machine, will cost $700 per month, but the cost is less with a roommate.A semester in China, living comfortably, costs under $6000 in total. Obviously, living in urban areas is more expensive than living in rural areas.

If you enter into Google “intensive study of Chinese” you will get encounter a series of schools in the major cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou) that offer “Practical Chinese” which, when combined with tutoring, is designed to help students through the Chinese version of a language qualifying exam, called HSK. Often these are called “Business Chinese" schools. In Shanghai you can find Mandarin House, but other cities also offer such programs – Capital Mandarin school in Beijing, and Hanfengwang in Guangzhou. These schools offer bilingual instruction and a great deal of intensive learning. One in Beijing advertises a recommendation letter from the US consulate. These schools may be far more expensive than other alternatives.

There are other private schools that also offer excellent opportunities for language study.The major advantage of private education is flexibility of training. Public universities that offer language training follow a fairly rigid schedule of classes and a fixed class schedule.If you cannot fit your time into the schedule of public education, then you will have to deal with the higher cost of private education. I have included some web sites to visit at the end of this article.

University oriented Intensive Language study ordinarily begins at the end of summer (the last week in August) and the end of the Spring Holiday (mid-February). Classes are usually offered 8 A.M. to Noon.Special foreign university study programs have their own programs in cooperation with a host school, but the ordinary experience is to fit your own education with the schedule of the schools.

There are a number of school rankings in English (Top Asian Universities) and these rankings are surprisingly consistent for China.Usually the top schools involve Beijing University and Tsinghua University in Beijing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, and often another school in the East such as Shandong. The Chinese Academy of Management Science publishes an informal ranking in English, for those who wish to choose among the top ranked schools. There is no official Chinese ranking of schools available in English. This is surprising, because there is nothing that the Chinese love to do more than rank things, a testimony to their Confucian tradition.The ranking is published in Chinese, not in English, because there have been cases of bribery associated with attempts to increase school ranking. As you might expect, the formal rankings in Chinese are very similar to those English language listings.

At any rate, these rankings apply to the university as a whole, and not to the international school. For a year I would go on tours of Beijing with a faculty member at Beijing Normal University, and I noticed that there were many Polish students on the tour. I asked one of the students why this was so, and the Polish student made the following point: All people in Chinese studies spend at least one semester abroad, and the Chinese government asks the students to rand their preferences.The Polish students feel that all the slots at Beijing University and Tsingua University will go to those from the US and the UK. Polish students would then end up in the provinces.If Polish students rank Capital Normal as their first choice, they will get to Beijing, and Capitol Normal is a fine school

I feel I must disclose the fact that I teach English and study Chinese at a university that has an international school and is not one of those ranked at the top of the list. A sample of students revealed the fact that many students end up at my university through informal word of mouth, through friends, and from the desire to be in Beijing. If you are interested in investigating this process, contact a university with a Chinese Studies department and see if you can get a recommendation from someone who is familiar with China.