Introductory Chinese B · East Asian Languages And Cultures
I've learned a lot of Chinese grammar and vocabulary/how to write characters this semester.
Like other sections, this class had a VERY heavy workload; weekly drill sessions; a short quiz every class (memorize memorize memorize!!); essays and recitation assignments; chapter tests; an oral midterm; oral and written finals. The saving grace of my grade was that the written final was extremely easy. What was particularly bad was that this already very challenging class was rendered even more difficult by Li Laoshi's awful teaching.
chinese vocabularly, new grammatical structures, how to express time and talk about our daily schedules, and to be comfortable making mistakes when learning new languages.
Reasonable, half the work of a typical intro. language class as one would expect (since it's 2.5 credits instead of 5). Daily assignments, several dialogues, straightforward midterm and final.
Basic grammar and everyday vocabulary How to read and appreciate traditional chinese script (how radicals contribute to meaning)
Traditional characters, vocab and grammar structures related to school, food, daily life, family, introducing ourselves, geography
Li Laoshi seems like a basically nice person who was thrown into a REALLY BAD situation of teaching beginning students while having *extremely* limited English skills and no prior teaching experience. As a result, this class consistently pushed the limits of acceptability in terms of consistency and clarity. She would often write in simplified characters (even on tests) and sometimes was unable to remember the correct traditional characters. More problematically, her language difficulties left me often unable to understand what our homework assignments were, what our quizzes were going to cover, when/where our drill sessions were meeting, what in-class activity we were supposed to be doing, and how to use grammar rules. As a result of these communication difficulties, I left almost every class frustrated and confused. This was not really her fault, but it was definitely a huge oversight by the department to allow someone with such limited English skills to teach the 2.5 class. Beyond her language problems though, Li Laoshi often seemed unsure of how to organize and pace the class. She would neglect to finish explaining a concept or rule but then expect to test us on it in the next class. Or she would try to assign long passages for us to memorize in two days. In those cases, most of the time, the entire class would protest and she would revise the schedule to give us some extr…
This course helped improve my Chinese speaking abilities.
Wang Laoshi was excellent. She encouraged class participation and was very patient when students didn't understand things. She was also quite good at explaining grammar and and understood when certain constructions would likely be confusing. Very sweet; fun class.
How to write and read traditional characters, how to converse about certain topics at an introductory level