New chinese classes

[mrbig]

Hello

I'm currently helping a company in beijing to come up with ideas for chinese classes/courses that would appeal to international students in beijing and those who are learning chinese in other places. they are putting together a set of courses online.

i would like to ask what kinds of classes you would like to be able to study/find online? is there anything that you want to study but isn't offered by the school/uni at which you study? any aspects of chinese which you think should be explained better than those classes which are already available online?

thanks for your ideas!

jim

[Xiwang]

Last year at Peking University, our semester ended on January 2. Given that January 1 was a school holiday and almost no one showed up for New Year's Eve, I suggested to the school that one way to boost turnout for the last day was to set aside that final day to teach Chinese dirty words.

Strangely, they ignored my suggestion.

As for ideas for Chinese classes for your new company, uh, I can't think of anything at the moment.

[keitha]

One thing that my local courses here in Sweden lacked was material to read up on before the courses started.

It's a great idea to have online material like word lists, common expressions that your courses will use. With such material students can focus on learning how to write and read them before the semester starts. The reason is that alot of people get overwhelmed by learning all the aspects at once (often at a high pace).

Most people I know (including myself) want to prepare as much as possible before going to china so we can focus on listening/talking or truly understand the material that is being used.

I would be very tempted by a course based on the opportunity to 'pre learn' things that I have a harder time to memorize or understand. Of course I will do as much preparation as possible even if I don't get that kind of information but a course setup with that in mind would be very nice.

Edited March 8, 2010 at 07:57 PM by keitha