Intensive mandarin course - forming a group (Shanghai)

[johndones]

Hey,

I'm trying to find some people who would be willing to study some mandarin intensively (5-7 hours a day) to form a group at some of the private schools in Shanghai. My level is probably little under 2000 words and most of schools in Shanghai don't have any intensive groups for that level.

If we get together we could ask some school to create a group for us and negotiate the price, don't worry about prices that most mandarin schools post on their websites, because they can be dropped even by 50% or more most of the time. Of course it's going to be little pricier than university, but price/value ratio will be far higher for sure.

I'm looking to study for one year, but if you just want 6 or 3 months, it's ok too. Most important is that you're willing to study hard as opposed to those universities where only a small percentage of people do.

If you have any interest please just post here and we can work something out, even if there's only 2 of us we can already get a decent deal, so please don't hesitate to post.

Also if somebody can give me advice on where I could find something satisfactory for myself I would be thankful too.

Regards

[anonymoose]

Far be it from me to criticise your plan, but I'm just curious, have you ever studied chinese that intensively before?

5 hours per day sounds like an awful lot, not to mention 7 hours, and especially when it's in a small group. I know everybody learns differently, and different people have different needs, but speaking from personal experience, even being in a big class for three hours per day was fairly intensive taking into consideration the time necessary to spend out of class to review and memorise new material (mainly vocabulary). I think there's only a certain amount the brain can absorb per day (advice given on other threads was to learn 20 words per day - I was doing in excess of 50 per day, and that was quite a lot). I think the point I'm really trying to make is that if you cover so much material in one day, you won't be able to retain it all, and any extra will just be wasted. You may be better off cutting the hours down a bit, and spending the remainder of the time consolidating what you've learnt.

Anyway, I'm sorry that I wasn't of any help in responding to your actual request. I hope you can get it together as you wish. It would be interesting if you post an update on your experience if you manage to get it going.

[johndones]

Before I was having one to one classes for 3 hours every day (plus maybe 0.5-1 hour at home practicing writing, on very rare occasions 2 hours) and while I was happy with my progress (30-40 words a day) I still felt I wasn't really getting pushed enough. I retained probably something about 90% of what I learned so I think I still can increase the input of information. I want to do about 50-60 a day, which I think is still in my comfortable range.

Percentage is going to go down a little, but it the amount will still be much higher. Also I noticed that the more I learn the better my actual ability of learning new things becomes, before 30 a day seemed a lot to me and I had to work a little to remember it, later I became very comfortable with it, now I can do 40 without much trouble too. Of course somewhere there's probably going to be the ceiling where percentage will start to fall rapidly, but I think that would be at around 80-90.

Group classes always tend to be slower even difference from 1 person to 3 can already be pretty big (if somebody wants to have that kind of relaxed atmosphere were you talk a lot in class, it makes learning much more pleasant and it's easier to retain stuff that way) so I know I wouldn't go as fast as I used to with 3 hours. So if I want to learn much faster than I used to during 3 hours of one to one classes in a group class I think 6 hours of group would be appropriate. One hour break in between would be useful.

I could learn more words a day at home without any trouble only that it would interfere with the course in a way because some vocab might overlap (and learning too advanced vocab would be harder to retain at my level)

Note that I'm relatively young and always tended to learn most of stuff faster than rest of people (not that it's just Chinese that I can learn fast), so I realize that most people are not comfortable with that, but I also believe there are many other people around that can do that, so I really hope they have the same problem.

I'm pretty sure I will get it set up somehow, if not I will do one to one again, but for 4-5 hours. So if your really interested I can post some update after 1-2 months of starting the cramming.

[johndones]

Before I was having one to one classes for 3 hours every day (plus maybe 0.5-1 hour at home practicing writing, on very rare occasions 2 hours) and while I was happy with my progress (30-40 words a day) I still felt I wasn't really getting pushed enough. I retained probably something about 90% of what I learned so I think I still can increase the input of information. I want to do about 50-60 a day, which I think is still in my comfortable range.

Percentage is going to go down a little, but it the amount will still be much higher. Also I noticed that the more I learn the better my actual ability of learning new things becomes, before 30 a day seemed a lot to me and I had to work a little to remember it, later I became very comfortable with it, now I can do 40 without much trouble too. Of course somewhere there's probably going to be the ceiling where percentage will start to fall rapidly, but I think that would be at around 80-90.

However I am afraid that writing might suffer a little, but it's something I can practice more on the weekend.

Group classes always tend to be slower even difference from 1 person to 3 can already be pretty big (if somebody wants to have that kind of relaxed atmosphere were you talk a lot in class, it makes learning much more pleasant and it's easier to retain stuff that way) so I know I wouldn't go as fast as I used to with 3 hours. So if I want to learn much faster than I used to during 3 hours of one to one classes in a group class I think 6 hours of group would be appropriate. One hour break in between would be useful.

I could learn more words a day at home without any trouble only that it would interfere with the course in a way because some vocab might overlap (and learning too advanced vocab would be harder to retain at my level)

Note that I'm relatively young and always tended to learn most of stuff faster than rest of people (not that it's just Chinese that I can learn fast), so I realize that most people are not comfortable with that, but I also believe there are many other people around that can do that, so I really hope they have the same problem.

I'm pretty sure I will get it set up somehow, if not I will do one to one again, but for 4-5 hours. So if your really interested I can post some update after 1-2 months of starting the cramming.

[danielmao]

Hello together,

I read this thread and hope that you with your experience can give me a good tip regarding a high quality chinese school in Shanghai. I was living in China for a year but since I was there on busines I didnt learn a lot. Now I want to come back for one year to study fulltime. I was in Shanghai and visited some schools. At the end Mandarin house and imandarin seems the most professional schools to me. But I read also a lot of negative comments. So do you have any recommendation? I have one year and if it necessary I better pay a little more to get quality. But for sure I dont want to waste money. So it would be so nice if you could tell me something about you experiences regarding language schools in Shanghai. I guess somebody on you level can help me. Beginners not

thank you very much

[johndones]

Well I'm not sure what your expectations are, but if you write in this topic I suppose you want to learn fast

Group lessons-

.

My favourite way of measuring how tough a class is, is just how many words a day you learn, while that method has many flaws I think it's the best one.

So basically taking one of those popular 3 hours a day courses will be around 20 words a day (some do 30, but I think it's rare), after one year of that you will probably be able to get level 7-8 on HSK (considering that you are a good student, because most of western people as far as I know have trouble getting to that level after one year), so it's possible that you get to HSK７ but just be prepared to study with people that won't :-).

Also I should mention that most of those private schools don't tent to do group corses for more advenced students, most courses that they call "advenced" are far from that, so you have to make sure they can guarantee you 1 year of interupted studying, I'm not sure but I heard that some schools have some policies that when all people leave your group classes will cease or be shortened in time.

1 on 1 lessons, are a GREATway to learn and I'm sure that if you study really hard (and your a little smart :-) ) you can speak/write/read/understand really high quality chinese. Of course it will be few times more expensive, but your progress can be that much faster too.

When I started learning chinese I started off with those regular 3 hours classes at one of private schools in Shanghai for 3 months, luckly for about 1 month there was no other people, so I had some 1 on 1 time with the teacher and we instantly studied 2x faster (30-40 words a day), which still wasn't very fast, but I could easily feel the difference (I still chatted a lot with my teacher, so it wasn't really that intensive).

Now I attend one of those university courses (3 hours a day too), which is not much different from those group classes at private school only that you don't get to practice speaking at much and atmosphere is less relaxed, but performance wise it's comparable only that much cheaper.

So the obivious question is how I try to study faster than they do - everyday I just find around 100 new words on the internet and cram them in, sometimes it takes me one or 2 days (depends on how many new characters in it), of course later on I don't remember 100% of it, but I'm pretty sure it's above 50% so it's worth the effort anyways.

So If I add up what I learn in university classes + what I stduy myself - overlap in those then it's around 40-60 a day, which is ok, but I can't say I'm 100% satisfied because I'd love to do 80-100 everyday, but I will require some more practice, and also the more characters I know the easier it is to learn new words, so right now I also focus on learning new characters so that in 2-3 months time I can have all the 2500 most popular characters covered, so that I can grasp new words more easily (I already know around 1000-1200 chars for sure, so it shouldn't be hard by any means).

Also I'm not certain on wether watching TV, talking to people does that much good for me, I'm 100% sure it's great to lock in words that you already learnt, but didn't really master them, but as for learning new stuff it's not so good.

So basically my best advice is cram new words/characters for 2-3+ hours everyday after classe and your progress will be fast no question.

Oh and I use software called Pleco on my PDA to cram that stuff, you can look it up online, very good stuff cause you can use your phone to actually practice writing.

Sorry, so long

So to sum it up :

If you want to do it fast either get 1 on 1 lessons or go to a group lesson and cram a lot of stuff yourself.

In a meanwhile I will make my list of words to cram today (it's actually more troublesome than cramming itself).

[Scoobyqueen]

I retained probably something about 90% of what I learned

Incredible!

[johndones]

Note that it was while doing 30 words a day, so it's not that incredible.

Also I should make it clear that by retention I don't mean mastering a word, I just mean knowing how to write it, pronounce it and know it's rough meaning, but no doubt there will be contexts where I don't quiet get it, but most of the time you can figure it out yourself anyways. So basically by retaining I mean that I won't really have to cram in a word again.

Even at 30 words a day 90% is a rough number that I made up in a very subjective matter, so I cannot really tell you what it is when doing 80 a day, but I'm pretty sure I still get to learn more.

On a side note I have to say that most of people on this forums don't tend to be optimistic about learning chinese :-).

If you look around the internet there's a lot of people that have made language learning routines for themselves so that they are able to learn some languages at 200 words/a day (and that's not full time study).

If somebody is interested then you can look it up yourself, but in a nutshell there's just a lot of people that are learning languages (and other stuff in general) few times faster than the rest.

For many I think it's just enough to optimize their usage of time, so they could learn more in the same time, I know too many people that “study" for many hours, but learn crap.

And I just wasted time writing this post cause I could have probably learn 5-10 new words during that time ：-)

[anonymoose]

If you look around the internet there's a lot of people that have made language learning routines for themselves so that they are able to learn some languages at 200 words/a day (and that's not full time study).

If somebody is interested then you can look it up yourself, but in a nutshell there's just a lot of people that are learning languages (and other stuff in general) few times faster than the rest.

Firstly, the internet is accessible to most people throughout the world, so out of the 6+ billion people out there, I don't doubt there are some who can learn languages at this rate and claim so on the net, but as a proportion of people in general, I'm sure it's very very small.

Secondly, just because something appears on the internet doesn't mean it's true. Again, I'm sure there are people who can achieve it, but I suspect many of the claims on the internet are inflated.

Perhaps you are particularly talented at learning languages, so you interpret other peoples views on learning as not being optimistic, but for myself at least, I try to state my views realistically. As for learning 200 words per day, I doubt I could achieve that, but frankly I wouldn't even want to try, because I think most people would burn out pretty quickly like this, and lose any enthusiasm for learning Chinese that they might have had.

[johndones]

Of course I agree with all you said and it applies to every part of life, wheter it's studying, making money or anything else there will be always people better than the rest, but the question is wether it's just predestined or if one can affect those things.

For me it's just like making money, if I want to make 10mln$ I will want to do that by increasing the rate of my income rather than wating for the money to add up at a constant rate. Some people can easily triple their income, while others will get excited about a 30% raise :-). I think studying is no different.

I don't really believe in the whole concept of talent, I think it's all about being really interested in something and willing to put effort into it. When I was starting to learn chinese I thought 30 a day was good, but then I looked around the internet and found out that many people do it faster (doesn't really matter if true or not) so it gave me a lot of motivation to study faster, because I just can't sleep at night knowing that some people do it so so so much faster with little more effort.

Anyways, it's my very personal opinion, I'm just myself and not someone else, so I cannot know for sure how it feels for other people, so I'd love to hear from other people what are their problems with studying more? Just can't force themselves to do that？ Their brain refuses to remember things after some limit?

I always have some trouble to force myself to actually cram it, and I'm not exactly consistent with time spend every day, but if I do less one day most often the next day I can make it up.

So for me it's the willpower that drives it all.

[imron]

have made language learning routines for themselves so that they are able to learn some languages at 200 words/a day (and that's not full time study).

Whenever I hear claims like these, I always like to throw a little bit of math at the situation. Assuming 8-hours of study a day, 200 words works out to about 1 word every 2-3 minutes. For a Chinese learner, and especially a beginner learner, and even more especially a non-full time learner trying to fit that 8-hours in between work and other life commitments, I just don't believe that is feasible, and I would seriously doubt how well the person actually learnt the words and their retention rate beyond a few days.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, learning Chinese is a marathon and not a sprint. I hear what you're saying about using more effective study methods -- look at some of my other posts, and you'll see I'm all about intensive and effective study methods -- the thing is, simply increasing the amount of words you learn a day is not one of those methods, and it can actually be detrimental to your study and here's why:

Let's say you have 3 hours a day to study. Before you even learn anything, let's apportion 1 hour of that time to revision to ensure that you don't forget the words you have already learnt. This step is probably one of the most effective things you can do if you're studying a language and is very important if actually learning the language in any usable way is your goal.

That then gives us 2 hours a day for learning new words. Let's assume now you set yourself a goal of 10 new words a day. By words I don't mean characters, so it's possible that each word might include 2-3 (or even 4) new characters (in my experience, words are generally the most useful unit to study). Anyway, that gives us a total of about 12 minutes per word. That gives you plenty of time to learn the meaning, learn how to write and pronounce each character in the word, enter it into your spaced repetition program to aid with future revision, and also gives you time to practice using it sentences, or practice listening to it in a sentence spoken by a native speaker. By the end of that 12 minutes you will have learnt that word reasonably well.

Now let's say you increase your goal to 20 words a day. By doing this, you have reduced the time per word to 6 minutes each. Perhaps that's not a problem and 6 minutes is still enough to learn a word effectively in a way that you won't have forgotten by the end of the week, but you should be able to see my point - by increasing the amount of words you learn you are reducing the amount of time you can spend on each word. Each person will be slightly different, but there will be some point for everyone at which adding new words decreases the effectiveness with which you are learning each of those words. If you want to talk about smart study methods, in my opinion it is much smarter to learn 10 words really well, than learn 20 words but not really be able to use them, and to have forgotten half of them one week later. After all, the goal is long-term usage.

The other thing to realise, is that all of the above is only vocabulary acquisition. This is of course really useful and important, however it's not taking into account listening comprehension, speaking practice, grammar and all the other important things related to actually learning a language rather than just accumulating large amounts of vocabulary that you can't actually use, or use very well.

Studying faster does not equal studying better. As the Chinese say: 欲速则不达.

[johndones]

It's all about training retention abilitties, there's many people that claim it's almost impossible to really increase it by a big margin, but there is as well a lot (but probably less) of peolpe like me that that believe the opposite.

You seem to suppose that the time needed to retain new vocabulary would be constant throught the learning process, which I think is very untrue. Not only can it be affected by increase in retention abilities, but the more one knows of a language the easier it becomes to learn new vocab too. You could also factor in optimizing the methood of studying itself, becasuse with time you will find out what works for you the best.

I think to learn a language is not an achievement, any one can do it, the most important is how much it took someone to do it.

Just like with money, if somebody has 10mln$, but is 60 and was working for 40 years to save it up, then I'll think that's no big deal, but if somebody does 10mln$ in 1 year, then I'd congratulate him :-).

[gato]

I'm trying to find some people who would be willing to study some mandarin intensively (5-7 hours a day) to form a group at some of the private schools in Shanghai. My level is probably little under 2000 words and most of schools in Shanghai don't have any intensive groups for that level.

At a rate of 30 words / day, does that mean you have only been studying for two and half months?

[johndones]

At time of writing this post I have studied for around 3 months, but that includes some perioids when I was doing only 10-15/day, because later everyone left my group classes so it changed to 1on1 classes so we started to do 30/day. Now I have been doing much more for about a month.

[gato]

So you should be up to about 3000 words now. That's pretty impressive if you are able to retain what you learned. The HSK word list only has 8840 words. You'll be able to finish the entire list in less than a year.

[imron]

You seem to suppose that the time needed to retain new vocabulary would be constant throught the learning process,

No I don't. The ability to learn and retain new characters increases with the more characters you know. This does not contradict what I said though, because this speed increase comes naturally from an increased capacity to learn characters rather than just simply ramping up the number of characters without having the ability to handle them. You can't just keep increasing that limit unless by "learning" you mean look it up in the dictionary, think about it for a few seconds and then think "learnt".

There will be a sweet spot of the number of characters a person can learn that will be slightly different for everyone. There will also be short periods of time when you can put in a spurt and learn more, and there will be other times when you are busy with other things/tired and so you will learn less. Like I said though, it's a marathon. If you start out sprinting, you won't get very far before collapsing exhausted.

[johndones]

gato - well this is basically my plan - to be able to pass highest level of HSK after one year of study without any trouble.

imron - but you still think that ones pure retention ability based on brain power (I have no idea what's the right word for that, not enough cramming in english I guess :-) ) remains constant, if you don't know what I mean by that let me give you an example.

Say one person is trying to remember a combination of 30 digits, first it might be hard, but as he trains that ability he can be able to memorize 200 after some intensive training, and that is what I understand by brain power. Of course remembering digits will use some methoods useless in learning a lanugege, just wanted to explain what I mean.

But even if you don't believe in this, but recognize that knowing more characters will help to learn others faster (which of course I agree and I think it's a very important factor as I pointed out earlier) then I don't know how you can say that it's better to learn a fixed ammount of words rather than to increase it with time.

[Scoobyqueen]

to be able to pass highest level of HSK after one year of study without any trouble.

What grade are you aiming for?

[anonymoose]

well this is basically my plan - to be able to pass highest level of HSK after one year of study without any trouble

Haha, well I'm in Shanghai too, so I'll buy you a beer if you manage. (I'll need to see the HSK certificate as proof, though.)

[johndones]

Well I want to get the highest grade, of course if I won't get it because of some trick questions or somebody that checks the paper won't like my writing style then I won't care, but as long as something like that doesn't happen then I want to get the higest one, and if I don't I will regard it as a failure of sort.

anonymoose - Sorry but I don't drink alcohol at all :-)