Which of these Unis is Best for a Beginner like me?

[jb1414]

Hey my name is Jake Im a Canadian student interesting in studying either a year or a semester in Beijing and I am here to ask for help or advice on deciding which university to choose

My experience in chinese is very little, I took a beginner course last year (at mcgill) but that was a year ago and I havent practiced since so Im thinking I will need to start near the bottom again and work my way up.

The schools Im thinking of applying to are

Beijing Normal University

BLCU

Tsinghua

(possibly beijing film academy i heard it had a mandarin for foreigners program which would be cool)

Anyways so if anyone could tell me which university has good classes for beginners I would really appreciate it. I am more interested in learning to speak chinese but i know that to become fluent writing is important as well so I would definitly prefer a school with a strong listening / speech aspect

Also I want to meet cool and fun people!!1

Any help is much appreciated! Thanks

[adrianlondon]

This has been convered to death; use the search option. I know you may think "yeah, well, that's all so 2006" but they haven't changed much ;)

As for beginners - well, I think most people who go to China to study are beginners so most of the forum posts will be related to beginners wanting to start at BNU, BLCU, Tsinghua etc.

Once you've got some specific questions, pop back here and ask them.

[extrapages]

(possibly beijing film academy i heard it had a mandarin for foreigners program which would be cool)

my friend took her mandarin classes there - shes actually still there studying acting (all in chinese)... and her chinese is pretty awesome. and although im not sure about the curriculum, i know that the few people who are there are serious about learning chinese because its a major step in moving onto getting trained and taking classes in chinese. its not like many other places where people are there just to learn chinese, party, fool around, "experience" china - these cats buckle down and seriously focus on learning the stuff.

and if you end up hating it, its smack in the middle between bnu and the other schools. so you wont be screwed in terms of having to move around all over beijing.

but yes. as adrianlondon has noted, this really is a subject thats been covered extensively. so use the search tool and you wont be disappointed.