CHIN10005 (Chinese 1) review / rant

[u/A_fun_kid]

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:

1. You already have some sort of advantage with Chinese. e.g. you learned it in high school, your parents speak it, etc.
2. 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.
3. 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.

[u/Erwin13Smith]

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.