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Same thing happened to me last year around this time. Wouldn’t worry too much about it, but if you want to contact SWUN to follow up： 陈老师（Mrs.Chen) is usually the point person and very helpful (here’s her email address: [email protected]).
Group classes are usually on weekday mornings four days a week,four “class hours” a day, and they have different days for different levels. Individual classes are usually two hours a day, three days a week, and it’s between you and the teacher whenever you want to have class.
Quote:So I assume you can agree with the teacher to not teach characters at all?I’m sure that’s possible, although I not sure how far you can go with Chinese with out learning some characters. Certainly at the beginner level it’s important to master pinyin, so they should have tutors that are appropriate for that.
Quote:Never heard of the 1on1 tutoring at a University. Are those 6 hours in 1 day? 5 days? Can u choose the schedule yourself? What about the exams? Is the VISA exactly the same? Sounds really interesting!It’s not 6 hours a day, it’s six hours a week, so more like 2 hours a day for three days a week. You can choose whatever schedule is best for you and your tutor. No exams, but if you’re not looking for a degree in Chinese, those things don’t matter much anyway. The visa is exactly the same. The normal classes are about 6000rmb a semester if I remember correctly. The one-on-one classes are 10,000rmb a semester. So the trade-off is considerably less hours of class time, but all the attention is on you, not spread out over 10 or 15 students.
Quote:The Skritter app is incredible, I just wish it were cheaper. I’ve heard of people just signing up for a month and downloading everything before canceling their subscription, but it still has to be really good for me to use that over Pleco flashcards.As someone who pays the $9.99 a month for Skritter, I only think it’s worth it if you use it on average at least a half hour a day. It only comes out to the cost of one hour with a 60rmb tutor a month, so I’d say it’s worth it. Also if too many people just download the content then cancel the subscription, then you get the same problem you had over at the Big Love Music Festival and eventually we won’t have nice apps/music festivals like this anymore, but to each their own I guess…
Those pleco cards are definitely solid!
I studied at SW University of Nationalities, but not Sichuan University. The first semester I did the normal classes (10 to 20 people to a group depending upon how many students liked that teacher’s style), and maybe it’s just my learning style, but I didn’t really like getting such little attention/speaking time in class (note: it’s probably the same for the normal classes at SU). Second semester I sprung for the one-on-one classes at SWUN (about 10,000rmb per semester, but only 6 hard hours of class time). Even though it was considerably less hours of class time, the teacher has the ability to just focus on your strengths and weaknesses. So it was a big boost to my grammar, fluency and vocabulary. Not to mention the fact that for half the class you can just discuss topics that you want to talk about, while the teacher is arming you with the appropriate vocab for that topic the whole way through. If you do the one-on-one the important thing is steer the class time in the direction that you want it to go, and not stick to the book if you don’t want to. Although, if you’re visa isn’t an issue, you can just hire a tutor anywhere for those six hours a week, so neither university is necessary and it’s possibly cheaper.
If your visa is an issue, and you do like the one-on-one, check out if SU has the same option, and class hours/cost.
If you don’t want to spring for the one-on-one classes, one good thing about SWUN is that if you don’t like your teacher’s teaching style at any point during the semester, you can simply walk across the hall and try out a different teacher(note: at a different level as well). My understanding is that the benefit of studying at SU is that it’s 20 hours a week and not 16 (which really comes out to be about 14/13 hours if you include the breaks). Also, a lot of people tend to pick SWUN because they think their are less native-English speaking classmates divert your attention away from Chinese learning. Not sure how relevant that argument is these days…
Hope that helps…
In case you haven’t heard of it, I really like Popup Chinese. I think the dialogue is more interesting and colloquial than ChinesePod. The downloads might be free, but I pay the yearly subscription because it’s an all around decent product. It probably doesn’t have nearly as many podcasts as ChinesePod, but has well over 1000 and is a good alternative…
Also, if you’re looking to work on your writing Skritter just came out with a brilliant iphone app for that.
Quote:I sometimes feel like i need a shower after reading chinasmack. Some of that shit is nasty, and super -cynical….Not to mention not very uplifting…
