Feedback on ACC?

[lilac521]

I am looking for some feedback on the Associated Colleges in China program. I am looking at this one and a few others (Princeton, IUP) and saw a lot of comments about the other programs rather than ACC. I will have completed over 4 years of Chinese study and may do the Princeton program first, will ACC have a class at my level? How well are the teachers trained? Any ideas of the program's quality would be awesome! Thanks!!

[LaVandez]

I think it really requires you spelling out what level you are for example:

Currently, I know about 2500 characters and I know a few dozen chengyu. I can watch chinese tv with little to know problem as long as it's pretty standard putonghua.

If this for example were the case then I think the people on this site could give you more help.

[chen88]

This response is perhaps two years late, but since this is archived I thought a response would still be desired.

There is an article about ACC available online here. It describes life, in general, at ACC.

ACC’s instructors are extremely well-prepared. They work as a team within each level of instruction, and they spend countless hours preparing for classes. Most of the instructors are in their twenties and thirties, and during each semester their lives start to revolve around the program. As such, they grow quite close to the students.

ACC is the right program for students whose main goal in attending the study abroad program is to become proficient in Mandarin Chinese. The program’s linguistic training is of excellent quality and extremely intense. Going to PiB and following with a fall semester at ACC works just fine- there are plenty of students who do so. It is just as effective to go to ACC for the summer and fall semesters.

As for going to ACC after four years of college Chinese and a summer at PiB, it really depends on your Chinese fluency. There are students who take two years of Chinese in the US and then test into fourth year Chinese at ACC. Likewise, there are students who study Chinese for three years in America and then test into ACC’s second year course. It really depends on the quality of the previous instruction that you have had and how much improvement you make at PiB. ACC requires an oral interview before they make the admissions decision, so they should be able to tell you if you would fit the program or not.

However, the fifth year students have a workload that anyone would find strenuous- about 250 characters a night or so and rather long texts. They pretty much spend the whole day studying, and weekends are no exception. There tends to only be a few fifth-year students every semester, and they have a few instructors, so the fifth year students and instructors become more or less a clique. They put in a lot of time and get the most out of the program.

So if your main goal in studying in China is to gain proficiency in Mandarin Chinese and you are willing to lose lots of sleep over it, ACC might be a great choice for you.

[yonglin]

...about 250 characters a night or so...

So after 10 weeks in this program, they know 12,500 new characters? I wonder exactly how useful this will be, given that a well-educated Chinese usually knows around 6,000 or so.

[chen88]

Okay, maybe I exaggerated a bit. I think it is usually over 200 characters for them per night, but I did not actually do fifth year at ACC so I cannot be sure.

Is that 6,000 character statistic referring to individual characters or to words? I have never been able to figure that out...

Also, they tend to do much of the more specialized vocabulary during fifth year. And like the other intensive study centers, ACC uses the 填鸭式 (duck-stuffing) method to maximize how much students learn abroad. So of course students don't remember everything.