New semester has started at Sun Yat-Sen University. During my previous three semesters here I have received the Excellent Student Award (being best at my class, grades 80+) two times and once I got a Didn’t-Skip-Classes Award (or something like that, for someone who skipped a very very few classes and grades were 70+).

So I have a lot to prove this semester! Lets take a look what kind of courses I’m having this semester.

Compulsory courses

综合

As always, there is the Comprehensive Chinese course which includes vocab, grammar, reading and writing. We changed to a new book series for this course and are now using Road To Success Advanced. It’s very different from the last book series we used the previous three semesters. New book is a welcomed change, but unfortunately our teacher is a tiny bit dry. We had such a great and entertaining teacher last semester, that I can’t help but to feel bit disappointed. My biggest challenge have always been how to be motivated when studying boring material, any tips?

计算机

Computer class! During this class we will learn how to use Word, Power Point and Excel in Chinese. I’m not sure how much I will learn during this class as I know how to use those quite well already. But it’s a good idea to get used to the Chinese interface. This course should help us write our thesis and make Power Point Presentations, or PPTs, if we work as a teacher some day. The teacher is young and energetic, so that makes this course better.

偏误分析

Error Analysis is a course that will help us to teach our students and correct their mistakes and errors. Hopefully it will also help me to correct some of my own errors as well. During this course we will need material to analyse, which will be a bit challenging for me. There aren’t so many Finns around here whose Chinese I could analyse, but I hope to find at least one or two. Or find more online. Teacher is young, but seems to know very well what she is doing. I think this will be a good course.

教育心理学

Educational Psychology will be one of the best courses this semester, at least that’s how I feel like just after first class with the teacher. We will learn how students learn the best and how a teacher uses this information in order to help the students. I’ve always been interested in learning methods, strategies and such, so I’m really looking forward what we will learn during this course. This teacher taught us last semester as well and she’s great.

毕业论文写作

Thesis writing! Of course we need a course to teach us how to write a thesis and this course is all about it. We will learn everything from how to choose a topic to the layout of the paper it self. One important task this semester is to choose a teacher to guide you with your thesis. The best teachers get chosen really quickly so I want to make my decision fast. I don’t want to end up with a young teacher without any experience. The teacher of this course is quite excellent, perhaps I should ask her.

太极拳

And then there is the Taiji, compulsory course  for us degree students. I feel so lucky that I don’t have to use my head and think what to do on Friday evening as I have Taiji classes then! What a relief! (Or not…) There isn’t anything wrong with Taiji, I actually like it, but not in this setting. Not when there are 50 students and all of us just want to pass the stupid thing.

Selective courses

朗读与正音

Read aloud and correct pronunciation is the name of this course, just what I need! We will prepare texts at home to read to the teacher and she will correct us, that’s the basic pattern for this course. I hope to improve my tones and some tricky pronunciation point that I still haven’t got right (z c zh ch). This teacher was really strict when she was my Comprehensive Chinese teacher a year ago and I expect her to keep it like that.

中国民俗及体验

This might be the most fun course of the semester! On this course to Chinese Popular Customs our teacher will introduce as to interesting places in Guangzhou related to different popular customs on the area. We will then visit them our selves taking notes and photographing the visit. After that we will present our finding to the class. What a great idea for a course!

中国哲学

Chinese philosophy is taught by one of my favourite teachers, our Comprehensive Chinese teacher from last semester. I probably don’t do the exam on this course but just because of the teacher I’m willing to take the classes. I’m sure it will be entertaining and interesting at the same time.

That’s it!

So these are my courses this semester. During this semester we will decide our thesis topics, find a guiding teacher and finally write a 开题报告, Chosen Topic Report, or something like that to finalize our topic choose. Next Summer and Autumn will be all about writing the thesis of about 6000 characters, there’s a lot to learn before that!

In September I wrote about my first impressions of autumn semester’s courses. Now it’s time to look back what I learned and what kind of grades I got! Last semester was the end for my third year, and my final year will begin at the end of this month. If all goes well, I will graduate in December.

For new readers: I’m studying Chinese as a foreign language undergraduate degree at Sun Yat-Sen University. My major Chinese with a specialisation to Teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

口语

Spoken Chinese course continued like the semester before this. Too many students in class and a teacher who liked his own voice more than ours. We did learn many sentence patterns, but didn’t use them often enough to actually remember them. We only had one presentation per student, which is way too little to actually help with our spoken Chinese level. My final grade was 86.

现代汉语

Modern Chinese course number two continued with the same book as spring semester 2012. We learned a lot about Chinese characters and even more about Chinese grammar. We also had to write a minimum on 1000 characters mini thesis about comparing a grammar point in Chinese and in our native language. I like the teacher a lot and was really satisfied with the course. My final grade was 91.

写作

I usually like Chinese writing courses because I like essay writing, but this semester didn’t seem to offer enough  challenge. I wrote pretty much the way I wanted, started homework always the night before and still got good marks. In the final exam I did a huge mistake though! The part two was to write an essay and that went well, but in part one you had to write an outline for an essay. I completely misunderstood the point of the essay! So with this stupid mistake I lost 30 points in the final exam, nothing to do with my writing skills. I was really happy to still get a final grade of 84.

综合

Comprehensive Chinese course was one of the most memorable ones. I liked the teacher a lot! He really made us use our heads and push us outside our comfort zone. He was funny, smart and didn’t go easy on us. The key in this course was to learn new vocabulary and chengyu’s (Chinese idiom usually consisting four characters). Final grade 84.

汉语课堂活动设计

On this course we learned how to plan class activities when/if we become teachers. The first half of the course we basically planned and tried several activities every week. It’s was really fun and I learned a lot! The latter half of the course we learned how to plan lessons including an activity for different kind of Chinese courses. I liked the two teachers a lot and it was perhaps the funniest course we had. Our exam was to be a teacher for 15 minutes and I think I did a pretty good job. My final grade was 91.

汉语语言要素教学

This course teaching us how to teach pronunciation, characters, vocab and grammar started badly. Teacher was young and inexperienced, it was painfully boring to sat on these lessons. Then I mistakenly criticized the teacher heavily while she was in a hearing distance. I felt so bad about it, but in the end she did change her teaching method! The following lessons were much much better! My final grade was 93.

太极剑

Taiji sword, one of the compulsory taiji courses we have (I’ll the normal taiji next semester). Too many students, hard to concentrate on teaching, lessons started at 6pm and were held outside.. Some of the reasons why I didn’t have much motivation for this course. I was glad to pass it and get a grade of 75.

中文报刊阅读

Chinese news paper reading course was perhaps the most boring course of the semester. I had zero motivation to participate in that course and in the end I think I didn’t even learn anything. Our teacher was young and bit inexperienced. She used a level of spoken Chinese too high for us, the hardest of all teachers. My final grade was 85 (it’s like 85%, 100 being the best). This was actually a compulsory selective course.

汉语熟语

My only selective course for the semester, Chinese idioms was a great course. Strict teacher, lots of idioms to learn and the fear that kept me doing my homework every time. It wasn’t an easy course, but I managed to get a 88 points final grade.

Conclusion

It was a hard semester for me. Too many things happening and taking away my motivation to study. I really thought that this would have been my worst semester, but in the end it wasn’t. I did better than on the spring 2012 semester which was a surprise.

Compared to my three other classmates* in five of the compulsory courses (not including taiji sword) I had the best score in four of them, one spoken Chinese I had the second best grade.

But why do I care what grades others get? At this level it often, well all the time, feels like there’s no progress in my Chinese level. It have felt like that for a long time now. The improvement is slow which makes it harder to be motivated to keep on learning. But at least I can see from my grades that I’m doing somewhat good job and I’m on the right track.

*(yes, there are only four students in my group, though we often have classes with other groups)

I have now sat on each course of mine atleast once and have some general idea what all the courses are going to be about and how the teachers are. Based on that I decided to make quick “first week review” of my courses this semester at Sun Yat-Sen University.

Like many of you remember, I’m studying Chinese as a Foreign Language undergraduate degree and my specialization is Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.

Compulsory courses

中文报刊阅读

This course will help with our newspaper reading and we  use a textbook called 报刊阅读教程. I know that this course will be boring, challenging and headaching for me, my vocabulary isn’t where it is supposed to be and it’s hard for me to motivate myself to study things that I find boring. I also believe that skills learned through this course will be very useful in HSK exam as the exercises are similar to the HSK reading section.

口语

We have a very interesting teaching on this Spoken Chinese course, his accent is very far from standard! But that’s not really what we are concentrating anymore at this level (even we should do that on our own, practice pronunciation and tones). The teacher is surprisingly good in this course too, humorous, talkative and has a clear plan what we are going to do. Our book 高级汉语口语 includes texts, vocabulary, idioms,  exercises, sentence patterns and group discussion topics.

I think we don’t have induvidually that much speaking time in class, but looks like the course will teach us how to use those different sentence patterns in speech. I might be able to use them in essay writing, but in spoken language I often tend to use very simple language.

现代汉语

Modern Chinese course continues with Chinese Characters and Grammar sections. This course is not for learning to language, but for learning about the language. According to our first homework, it seems that our teacher will often give as assigments to compare our native language to Chinese. During the semester we also have to make 1000 characters long “mini thesis” about comparing a grammatical point in our native language and Chinese. I bet this is going tobe hard, but also excellent practice before the real deal next year! Last time I didn’t get that good grade from Modern Chinese, so this semester I have to work harder!

写作

Last semester’s Spoken Chinese and  Introduction to Linquistics teacher is back and teaches essay writing now for us. Teacher told us that at this level she won’t pay attention to character writing anymore and we can type all of our homeworks. We can even type essays written at class if we bring our own laptops!　This semester we will write song, movie and book reviews for example. We also learn how to make survey report which might be helpful for many students when we start writing out bachelor thesis next year.

综合

And of course we sill have our Comprehensive Chinese course that will continue to develop our reading, vocabulary and grammar. The teachers is a very unique person and a very demanding one. The first classes have been way over my head! I really have to use a lot of time to prepare for these classes. I already have a feeling that this course will be one of the hardest ones this semester.

汉语课堂活动设计

As our specialization is Teaching Chinese on this course we will learn how to prepare useful classroom activities. Based on the first lesson today it looks like we will have quite a lot of homework from this course. The final exam is going to be to write a classroom activity plan. This course does sound quite interesting!

汉语语言要素教学

Last semester we learned how to teach different course, this time we will learn how to teach different aspects of Chinese: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, characters. During this course we also have an assigment to act as a teacher and teach a certain part of a textbook chapter. We can choose if we prefer to teach the pronunciation, vocab etc. section.

太极剑

Yes, taiji witha sword is a compulsory course for us! （As is normal taiji which i propably take next semester.）We still haven’t got any lessons from this and I just hope to pass it and have that mark on my papers. I’ve learned some normal taiji before, so maybe that could be an advantage?

Selective courses

汉语熟语

I’m learning from my mistakes and taking only one selective course this semester!　It’s called Chinese Idioms and the teacher is one of my favourites. A big part of this course will be chengyu, but we will also go over other types of idioms. The textbook we use is something our teacher have gathered together from many sources, I believe it can’t be find from bookstores. I hope that this course will help me with both reading and speaking, as idioms are a big part of Chinese language. Even though it’s a selective course, it will be hard work thanks to our strict teacher and hard material.

So here are all of my courses for this semester which will last until January. I’m going to have to study harder than ever to have good grades and make progress as fast as is needed. Only 16 months left until graduationg, 16 months left for (some kind of) fluency!

Registration

Registration to the Sun Yat-Sen University is not Hell’s Kitchen, but Hell’s Registration! It’s badly organized and people don’t know how to line up. When I got to the office at 7.30AM there were already 20+ students waiting. Door opened at 8.30AM and I was ready at noon, right before the staff’s lunch break. Of course I still have to go to the Entry and Exit Administration Division of Guangzhou PSB to apply for a year’s residence permit, but luckily that’s the same procedure every time.

So now I have gotten rid of my money, paid the tuition fees for the year, it’s time to wait for next week in order to buy textbooks on Wednesday and start class on Thursday.

Grades from last semester

During the registration I also finally got the rest of my grades from last semester! I was feeling really down in June when I got the first grades, but luckily the situation wasn’t as bad as I had thought. I even got a tiny recognition as having the best attendance record of my class! (Remember, my class has only three students.)

And my grades? 100 being the perfect score I got:

• 高级汉语综合（上）Advanced Comprehensive I 84
• 现代汉语（上）Modern Chinese Language I 84
• 汉语写作（上）Advanced Chinese Writing I 81
• 汉语语言技能教学 Introduction to Teaching Chinese language (Teaching different courses) 79
• 高级汉语口语（上）Advanced Spoken Chinese 87
• 对外汉语教学引论 Introduction to Education of TCSL 88
• 语言学概论 Introduction to Linguistics 98

These were the compulsory courses. The least happy I was with 84 from 现代汉语 because my class mates got much higher scores (90 and 89) and also with 79 from 汉语语言技能教学 because I really don’t want anything less than 80 from compulsory courses.

New semester

We will get our schedules for the new semester next Wednesday, but we should have the following courses:

• 高级汉语综合课（中）Advanced Comprehensive II
• 高级汉语写作 （下） Advanced Chinese Writing II
• 现代汉语 （下）Modern Chinese Language II
• 汉语语言要素教学 Introduction to Teaching Chinese (Pronunciation, Vocab, Grammar, Characters)
• 高级汉语口语 （下）Advanced Spoken Chinese II
• 中文报刊阅读 Chinese newspaper reading
• 汉语课堂活动设计 Activity Designing in Chinese Language Class

Besides these I have to see if I can finally attend taiji and/or taiji with a sword, because those are compulsory courses as well. We also have selective courses, but I try not to take those (or too many) in order to have time to work.

Conclusion

After all I might not suck in learning Chinese and I’m excited about the new semester beginning next week!

I hope posts like this one are interesting to at least some of you.

At the beginning of my spring semester I wrote about my Chinese as a foreign/second language undergraduate degree courses. The semester is over and I wanted to do another post to share with you what I learned. I hope this is helpful to anyone who is thinking of doing an undergrad in China.

Basic language courses

口语， Spoken Chinese

I was least satisfied with my spoken Chinese course. I have a feeling that I didn’t learn much and that is due to the fact that there were too many students in class, over 20. We learned new 表达方式 ways of expression, for example telling a story first and then using that to back up your argument or opinion. There wasn’t many opportunities to be corrected by teacher, basically not at all.

综合， Comprehensive Chinese

I learned a lot of vocabulary and grammar during this course. The teacher was strict which had a good effect on us students working harder. All in all I was very satisfied with this course.

写作，Writing

We learned to write different kind of opinion essays and also essays of a story or a short movie. I learned a lot during this course and we wrote about 8 essays which were graded by the teacher.

Teaching Chinese special courses

对外汉语技能教学， Teaching Chinese for foreigners（teaching different courses）

We learned basic things about teaching different courses to foreigners. We went over comprehensive course, listening course, spoken course and reading course. We made simple lessons plans and got feedback from them. The teacher was very very strict, but she knows what she teaches. I learned a lot during this course, especially that it’s really hard to be a good teacher!

语言学概论， Introduction to linguistics

This course actually made impossible possible, it made Finnish grammar interesting! We had lots of homework where we had to compare Finnish and Chinese, it was very interesting. Some things were quite hard and I perhaps didn’t learn everything that well, but it was just an introductory course, so I was happy with what I learned.

现代汉语， Modern Chinese

This semester we learned about Chinese phonology and vocabulary. The course was really hard and I often felt that my Chinese wasn’t good enough to study that course. I learned a lot of things during that course and came even more interested in this language.

对外汉语教学引论， Teaching Chinese for foreigners

During this course I thought a lot about which topic I could write my bachelor thesis. I learned some methods to use when writing a thesis if the topic is to compare a grammatical function in two languages for example (Chinese and native language).

Selective courses

中国国情，Current situation of China

This course was mainly listening to classmates’ presentations and free talk about the topics. It was an interesting course and topics run from education and health care to compassion and job hunting. A great class to use your Chinese when talking about an important topic.

现代汉语虚词学习，Modern Chinese function words

Absolutely the most boring course of all! Because of the lack of motivation, I didn’t learn that much during this course. I hope there was something that stuck though.

中级粤语，Middle level Cantonese

I learned new words and phrases in Cantonese, get to practice with my classmates and my teacher. I chose way too many courses so in the end I didn’t have enough energy to put into this course.

中国历史, History of China

This was a very interesting course and I learned a lot about China’s history that I didn’t know before. Excellent selective course.

—————-

I haven’t gotten the grades from my courses yet, but all in all I can say that I learned a lot during the spring semester. The most important lessons might be not to take so many courses!