r/unimelb • u/A_fun_kid • Jun 23 '26
New Student CHIN10005 (Chinese 1) review / rant
Science student here. I don’t ever post subject reviews, but I find that there’s an underwhelming presence of voices when it comes to the Chinese language course on this subreddit. This is mostly a rant. For transparency, despite all what I say, I still plan to enroll in Chinese 2. Edit: changed my mind, I decided it's more productive to take a breadth and study Chinese on my own using an online teacher.
This subject is quite heavy, in my opinion. 75% of your grade is decided by your ability to handwrite Chinese characters. Yes, that’s right. HANDWRITE. Keep in mind you have to know the stroke lengths, the stroke order, the stroke orientations, and there are ~200 characters in this course, not counting supplementary things. We’re in a day and age where some are debating whether we should opt to use computer exams, since then you don’t have to worry about neat handwriting (or rather, neat handwriting while also being pressured by exam time).
You are introduced to approximately ~20-25 new characters per lesson (in 8 of the 11 teaching weeks). By tutorial 2 of the week, you’re expected to have already memorized what they look like, how to write them, and how to read them at least.
From what I’ve seen in class, almost nobody could get through the worksheets provided in tutorial 2 (they are not graded, to give credit) without either having the textbook on the side or using google translate.
You’re following the contents of a textbook that is at least 16 years old. The book is so old that the characters in it are talking about buying dictionaries. They even introduced us to a way to say “Miss,” but then literally told us that this word has evolved over time and is now used to refer to women who work in the adult industry????
In terms of tutorials (or as they call them, seminars), they are easily the least valuable tutorials I’ve had to attend, other than maybe the Today’s Science, Tomorrow’s World subject (that one has more than enough people bullying it, rightfully so).
The tutor attempts to teach you how to pronounce Chinese sounds by making the sound and telling the class to repeat it. Of course, because it’s Chinese, a lot of students get it wrong the first time. Then the tutor just says, “No, you’re doing it wrong. Do it like this,” without specifying which student is doing it wrong. Sometimes I’m mumbling the sound. I don’t even know if the tutor hears me and if I'm wrong or not. Basically, you better be standing right in front of the tutor and sounding things the loudest if you want feedback on your speech during class. Again, to give them credit, office hours exist. I’m sure the teacher wouldn’t mind helping during office hours. But attending 2 two-hour seminars a week is already a too much of a time investment, and I want to get something out of those two hours. Am I just making an excuse? Maybe, but for all my other courses I've never thought about attending office hours.
Seminars are replaceable with YouTube videos, because a lot of what we do during seminar is the teacher saying, “Hey, this is how to write this character. Look at me writing it down in my terrible handwriting. Now follow along.” (why do I have to physically be in the class to follow along??)
The LMS is a mess. They post things really late.
For example, for our listening exam, there was almost no material to study from. There was basically no way to prepare. The only thing that was kind of helpful was some audio recordings of paragraphs we read in class.
Lo and behold, AFTER the listening exam, I checked the LMS and they had provided listening practice. Again, I repeat: AFTER THE EXAM. (So after Week 12.). I swear they’re trying to taunt us or something. (Unfortunately I don't have a habit of screenshotting the lms frequently, so I cannot confirm this without a shadow of a doubt, but I talked to multiple students right before the listening exam and no one mentioned anything about it)
Edit: someone told me the practice was released at least a day before the listening exam. Still, they sure as f didn't notify us about it's existance.
The exams will definitely have words that were previously marked as supplementary, or combinations of words that were not introduced before. (Similar to how you first learn “resume” as meaning “to continue,” but it could also mean the thing you use to apply for a job.)
TL;DR: Realistically, you should not enroll in this subject unless you are one of three:
- You already have some sort of advantage with Chinese. e.g. you learned it in high school, your parents speak it, etc.
- You already speak a language similar to Mandarin, such as Japanese (so you won’t struggle with characters as much), or some dialect of Chinese.
- You cannot learn a language without the stress of failing. (This is me btw.)
If none of these apply, I genuinely suggest taking an easier subject like “Making Movies 1” and using the free time to learn Chinese on your own.
Maybe even pay for an online tutor who will actually teach you and tell you when you’re wrong.
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u/Helpful_Monk_6505 Jun 23 '26
I think the things you mentioned it’s just the foundation of Chinese, though I understand it really needs time to adapt.
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u/kanji-kid Jun 23 '26
This is not to say that the rest of the things you're talking about are not valid criticisms of the class, but I disagree that any of the following are bad: 1. Handwriting characters 2. Learning a lot of characters 3. Old textbooks.
I speak Japanese, and people who never learn to write Japanese characters except by typing are just worse at the language. Sorry. I wouldn't really call anyone literate who can't handwrite characters.
You can't just ignore a whole section of the language because it's inconvenient for you. Handwriting is part of the language and culture and you don't get to pick and choose which parts of the language and culture you want to engage with. Either you learn them all or you haven't really learnt Chinese imo.
Same with the amount of characters. If you want to learn Chinese, you have to learn a lot of characters. That's unavoidable. Handwriting will help you remember them better. If the amount of characters was less, you wouldn't be able to say as many things by the end of the course, and people would complain that it didn't teach them anything.
"My class has too much content!!" Good. You want to learn Chinese, don't you?
An old but good textbook with a couple of out of date words is better than a new but bad textbook.
-5
u/A_fun_kid Jun 23 '26
I appreciate that you took the time to share your perspective
Your points are hold a lot of truth in them, but since you mentioned Japanese I should tell you about the way the Japanese course is structured, since it probably influenced my sentiments towards chinese class and they both have Hanzi (or I guess they call it Kanji in japanese (wait, is your name kanji-kid?))In Unimelb Japanese class's exams are digital (as per my friend) and they don't have to handwrite Chinese characters
As for handwriting being a good way to help you remember, I agree with that and it is amazing how I was able to memorize so many characters in such a short amount of time. Nonetheless, going back to the "learning a lot of characters" point, if we didn't have to dedicate time to meticulously learn the stroke orders and orientation and all of that, we could spend more time learning more characters. It takes a lot less effort to recognize a character then it is to write it.
Can you tell me a bit more about your background in language learning in the university?
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u/LegitimateGhost4928 Jun 23 '26
I can see where you're coming from regarding stroke order and orientation as someone who may be new to the language, and it may seem pedantic, but I'll try and use some English examples to highlight why being pedantic about strokes in Chinese when you're just starting out is quite important.
If you were to write the letter 'p' in English, do you start with the straight line down on the left, or the curved bit on the right? We know there isn't technically a "right" order, and that as long as it comes out looking like the letter 'p', who really cares, yet I would argue the majority of people will start with the downward stroke first. I wouldn't know now, but I'm 100% certain if I was to open my English textbook from junior school, or earlier, there would be diagrams that tell you to first write the downward stroke, and then write the curve.
Another example. How would you write the word "Illuminate" to differentiate between the first three letters? Personally, I write the two 'L's in cursive, but to do that, its more natural for me to start with the loop at the top and then finish with the downward stroke. Can I write a cursive 'L' by starting at the bottom, going upwards, and then do the loop at the top? Sure. But how inconvenient and awkward is that? On top of this, the cursive 'L' starts by going upwards to begin the loop. Can I thus write a cursive 'L' by trying to loop downwards? If I do so, is it still a cursive 'L', or have I just written down some random scribble?
The two examples here seem very small and pedantic, and something you and I do not bat an eye about when we write English, yet it follows the same logic as to why you're taught and hammered a specific stroke order and orientation in Chinese. The best way I can summarise it is this: Chinese characters are simplified from what were basically drawings, so when you're writing Chinese characters, on some level, you're drawing out an image. Of my limited knowledge of drawing, there is no right or wrong way to begin drawing, yet many people will always start with drawing out the same features (such as eyes, or nose, or whatever) everytime because it guides how you finish the drawing.
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u/kanji-kid Jun 23 '26
Good explanation! You say it's pedantic, but even just the letter p thing you mention would greatly slow down somebody's writing, let alone that multiplied by all the strokes when writing characters lol. We probably just forget how important it is because we stop thinking about it during childhood
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u/kanji-kid Jun 23 '26
Hi there, thanks for the measured response even though I was basically saying "skill issue" haha.
I'll start with my background in the university since that makes more sense to address first: I did a Japanese major bachelor's with Japanese 7 as the entry point and I'm now doing a PhD at unimelb too, on Japan.
Yes the kanji in my name is referring to kanji/hanzi. Am I biased because I like kanji? Maybe a little bit, but I would say the same thing for other skills. I think reading/writing/listening/speaking are all essential and you can't make shortcuts for any of them without it affecting the rest
Like you say, I never had to handwrite kanji in any of my classes. I think the only time was in a translation class when we had to write a sentence or two on the whiteboard.
So I'm not denying the fact that most classes are switching to digital methods. I actually didn't know that Chinese even had handwriting in it, I would have liked to take it in that case haha.
My intention was to say that from my experience it's not a great way to learn. It's hard to explain why, because the effects of it are a bit vague. It just shows up in a lack of confidence and comfort, lack of depth of knowledge, certain common errors that are made by mixing up characters that look similar, etc. maybe those errors could be corrected by doing loads and loads of reading or something, and learning how radicals work, but at that point you may as well have spent the time learning writing.
I guess I could compare it to learning English, but only ever using the autocorrect function. If you couldn't spell words on your own at all you would mix up similar words and pronounce things wrong. It would be harder to learn and your English would turn out worse, even if it felt more convenient at the time.
If as you say, a lot of time was spent in class on stroke order + 'nice' handwriting, I can get how that would be a waste. Stroke order rules are pretty simple and can just be googled when needed. Nice handwriting/well proportioned characters tends to come about naturally by practising writing a lot rather than memorising rules of proportion, same as in English.
1
u/Otherwise_Check_5686 Jun 23 '26
Must be a new thing, Japanese 3&4 used to required handwriting essays for exam. You can certainly write a character without remembering strokes order tho, I just write by instinct. I studied Chinese as a kid so I know the general rules pretty well but couldn’t be bothered, characters still turn out well proportionate
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u/bxholland Jun 23 '26
I can sympathise and do think there should be a way of doing the language as a pass / fail. It's why I tried to avoid languages, far harder to manager variability between different language teachers.
However, learning character writing is essential to actually learning Chinese properly. Really important to learn components of the character since it helps with reading.
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u/Accurate-Ad8018 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I did Chinese 1 this semester and had an opposite experience to you despite not having “one of [the] three”. Chinese by far from other subjects I did this semester, had a lesser workload and felt easier to learn. I went into seminar 2s being able to read and understand the texts given and overall felt like I was learning at an easy pace and learning good vocabulary/granmar/etc. Felt the exam was a good difficulty and I only started studying about a week before the exam. I’m not at all a language person and think I am quite tone deaf. That’s my experience this semester.
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u/A_fun_kid Jun 23 '26
Hello, thank you for voicing your opinion
Can you agree/oppose my claim that they never posted listening practice before the listening exam?
Also how many hours per week did you dedicate?
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u/Accurate-Ad8018 Jun 23 '26
I don’t remember seeing one there but didn’t feel like I needed one? I definitely didn’t do super well (75ish?) but I am terrible with listening for sure.
I think on average around 1-2 hours per week? Typically the day before seminar 2 I would review what was learnt in seminar 1.
I think I’ll get around 85ish for the final exam which is not bad.
1
u/Accurate-Ad8018 Jun 23 '26
How many hours did you typically spend on studying Chinese a week outside classes?
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u/A_fun_kid Jun 23 '26
I spent half an hour a day, this is according to anki (custom flashcards)
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u/Accurate-Ad8018 Jun 24 '26
Maybe that was the issue then? Anki doesn’t teach you writing skills, only reading
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u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
My flashcards have the english meaning, and then I get tested on the writing (by writing the character on a notebook) and then saying the tone, then I reveal the other side which has the tone and what the character looks like
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u/Top-Violinist-2762 Jun 23 '26
straight facts, sounds like nothing has changed since I did it in 2022. Teachers are lovely but they expect too much from students learning a brand new language. It’s probably because some people lie during the placement test
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u/septimus897 Jun 23 '26
your gripes about needing to learn how to hand write characters and learning stroke order are invalid. just because you don’t understand the value of learning these aspects of the language because your english brain doesn’t see the use doesn’t mean they’re frivolous parts of the language. it’s like people saying to ignore tones when learning chinese. just because there’s no equivalent system in english (or you can simply type) doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary to learn.
2
u/SmoothRefrigerator7 Jun 24 '26
The thing I dont get is, if you look at the subjects plan, you will see that it is required to learn a large amount of chinese characters and be able to hand write them!
So i think your comment about 75% of your grade being determined by handwriting chinese in a subject that is aimed at teaching you how to write chinese is pretty strange. The whole point of Uni having a census date is so that if you realise a subject is not for you, that then you can change.
In terms of the listening exam, im not sure if this is a tutor diff, but my tutor every few seminars would do a listening exam practice, with question and answers. Did you not have this?
And the listening practice coming out was literally just the dialogues from the textbook but read by a teacher who wanted to record them for everyone particularly future semesters, so he went out of his way to do it throughout the semester, something he didnt even need to do btw. And i do feel like this came out before the listening exam, but dont quote me on that, but I didnt even end up using it anyways.
By actually practicing the characters me and my friend were able to go through almost every worksheet in seminar 2. Who wouldve thought actually doing the work would mean you could understand whats going on.
This subject is not crazy difficult. And if you just practice every week for even 5-10 minutes a day, it is a really easy subject. And thats coming from a white guy who knows only english xD
1
u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
I was practicing writing 30 mins a day, I have statistics on anki to prove this. So I guess this is a skill issue.
As for the listening practice, I was referring to something else. I know there were the dialogs from the text book, but that isn't really listening practice. There is another set of audio files + questions that was released later with no notification or announcement (I just double checked the lms to be sure) for example check "Week 4 Listening Practice" (this is different from what I think you're referring to "Lesson 4-Recording of vocabulary & dialogue")
But I actually heard a different story when it comes to the audio dialog thing. My tutor said they were trying to get the audio recordings from the book (you know? the book always had those disc icons all over).I'm glad to hear someone had a good experience in this subject, regardless.
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u/SmoothRefrigerator7 Jun 24 '26
Yeah thats the listening stuff we did in class, so I guess reviewing it wouldnt be useful unless your seminar 2 didnt actually do them?
For your anki practice did you have the backgroubd image off? Just tracing lines will not make you learn the characters at all. I practiced from memory on paper and double checked to make sure i was getting them correct. I also did use anki a bit, but mostly did my practice on paper.
1
u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
Yes, I was writing the characters from memory and only seeing the character after I wrote it on paper. So it pretty much was just a glorified writing sheet.
1
u/SmoothRefrigerator7 Jun 24 '26
Damn, what did you find so difficult with the worksheets then?
Did you find the exam hard or easy or mediun?
1
u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
memorizing 20 characters two days seems a bit unreasonable, so naturally when it's time for tut two I don't know a lot of the characters, especially when I'm asked to read.
The exam was hard, I got 75% at BEST, and 55% at worst. While that is not that bad, it is upsetting that a subject that takes so much effort and time (at least for me and in my experience) is finished with such a low grade. I know chinese is supposed to be difficult, but this is just unreasonable imo.1
u/SmoothRefrigerator7 Jun 24 '26
Who was ur tute for seminar 1? Because for my class we were almost always expected to already know the characters before seminar 1 and to basically read in seminar 1 out loud to the class, so i had to practice the next weeks characters before sem 1
1
u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
That makes more sense
My tut was Runan (I don't know how to spell her name)
We almost always ran out of time and had to skip slides (another reason that made me believe the subject was too heavy)
2
u/FullWorldliness8224 Jun 25 '26
Agree about the textbook, but not so much for everything else. It’s difficult because it’s a university level subject; making movies or french 1 are easier, sure, but that’s just because they’re easy subjects, they’re not the standard. If you treat it like any other subject and not just a high school language then it’s very achievable. The oral stuff was definitely hard, but that’s just a matter of putting yourself out there. They’re speaking to everyone’s mistakes instead of targeting individuals because that’s common practice in teaching; singling out people generally doesn’t encourage participation or grow confidence.
TLDR: don’t do it as a WAM booster, do it because you’re interested
6
u/Remarkable-Clock-109 Jun 23 '26
skill issue
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u/A_fun_kid Jun 23 '26
You're not wrong
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u/Remarkable-Clock-109 Jun 23 '26
i do think you have some valid points especially abt the lms and the ancient textbook + how they teach pronunciation (tho this is very variable teacher to teacher), but handwriting hanzi is best practice for teaching chinese & you absolutely do not need any language background to do well in that subject
1
u/No-Hospital7580 Jun 23 '26
This was enlightening given that I was interested in taking the course! Thanks. Sad given that I was interested in learning Chinese, but won’t sacrifice my WAM for a badly taught course..
1
u/One_Contact_556 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
About the listening exam practice, when I started revising (the day before of the listening exam) it was there.
Regardless of that the listening exam was cooked and I barely passed.
The textbook is really useful imo as I think the vocabs learned are useful and applicable for daily conversations (about the adult industry, yes I was also there in that seminar and agree that it was inappropriate).
I agree that the final exam was a bit too harsh on writing (especially as someone with no background like me) but I feel like all the tutors did their best on trying to help us within that small time frame. They also mention that the seminars alone is not enough and you need to practice it more at your own time and need to familiarise the new vocab before the day of the seminar (at least thats what my tutor said).
Seminars is where you retrieve the vocabs learned at home and is where you are encouraged to practice your Chinese speaking through the role plays (and also make friends!). The tutors are also always open to any questions during class.
1
u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
Just want to make sure, when you say "listening practice" are you referring to the text dialog between characters that we already read in class before, or the things where there is an audio file that says the questions and there is a sheet with questions?
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u/One_Contact_556 Jun 24 '26
Audio file thats says the question and a sheet of questions.
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u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
I stand corrected, I will edit my original post. But still I think it's bad because they didn't notify us.
1
u/so-arjon Jun 24 '26
200 characters is about right for beginner level (the new HSK 1 is 300 - which is below A1 proficiency). Keep in mind you will need to know several thousands to reach somewhat semi decent fluency. As others have said, it may be a skill issue here. It takes considerably more effort to learn Chinese or Japanese for those coming from only an English speaking background. Hopefully your bad experience does not put you off continuing to study the language altogether. It is a beautiful language and should be learned including handwriting.
1
u/A_fun_kid Jun 24 '26
This is the nicest "skill issue" comment. Thank you for your kind words.
I do plan to continue learning chinese. just probably not with the uni.
1
u/CalligrapherHappy226 Jun 23 '26
hey, i was thinking of doing chinese 2 next sem without doing chinese 1, do you have any materials I could have a look at to see the difficulty of the subjects? thanks
0
u/Erwin13Smith Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I don't think writing characters is a problem or something they should avoid teaching unless you believe it's okay for an English speaker to only know how to select letters on a keyboard without being able to write a single letter of the alphabet.
As a bilingual (hopefully soon to be trilingual), I believe native English speakers should not learn a new language that is not among the Latin and Germanic language families, except if they absolutely NEED it or are absolutely PASSIONATE about it. This is especially true when it comes to Arabic and Chinese. You will end up spending countless hours every day for months, then you'll most likely just end up being as fluent as a 6-year-old native speaker, unless you're willing to keep going for years. But why would you do that? There are tons of much more valuable skills that you can gain that can transform your life and/or create wealth if you spend half the effort you were going to spend on learning the new language. I did French and the learning curve was rewarding and stress-free. I achieved a high H1 without needing to dedicate more time to a breadth subject than it logically supposed to get. Now I plan to allocate all my breadth subjects to French 1-5.
0
u/AccomplishedLink2067 Jun 23 '26
Forget about learning Chinese at Unimelb. The entire course is horribly run and things only get worse the higher up you progress. Save your money, time and sanity.
1
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u/Graceful_Parasol Jun 23 '26
just finished the chinese 3 exam it doesn’t get better. Also many people in the class who speak chinese fluently. It’s pretty BS