3 week intensive Mandarin in NE China

[GaoJinJie]

Hello all,

I am looking to do three weeks intensive mandarin over Christmas this year. I don't want to do a university short course because I am not interested in writing Chinese, only reading and speaking.

This what I am looking for:

1. Between 4 and 5 hours of Chinese lessons per day
   
2. One-on-one tutoring, although I might consider very small classes
   
3. A city that natively speaks good Mandarin
   
4. A smaller city with less of a Western presence than Beijing (I know every city has some Westerners, I'm just looking to avoid them) where I would need to use my Chinese to get by
   
5. I would also love a homestay if that's possible, I could offer English lessons to them too
   

At the moment I am leaning towards 1 to 1 Mandarin Workshop, which you can find here: http://www.1to1mandarinworkshop.com/ and http://www.chinese-f...orkshop-harbin/

The problem is that they are in Harbin and I don't have the clothing for that kind of weather. Buying arctic clothing will undoubtedly add more to the cost of the trip and will also affect my comfort.

Does anybody know a school in another city that offers what I'm looking for? I would also consider private tutors if they are reputable!

Dan

[tysond]

Poor Beijing. Everybody rules it out because there are some westerners there spoiling the immersion experience. Actually you can find quite vast areas of Beijing where there are practically no foreigners at all, or you can just not talk to them. Beijing does require Mandarin to get by. It would be an easier place to find a teacher or program, or have more options to choose from.

But if Beijing is out...

You can consider Tianjin. Standard putonghua, winter is similar to Beijing according to climate charts, largely free of foreign interference in recent years.

Chengde is good too but it's colder - not Harbin cold, but colder. But mercifully free of foreigners, I only saw one foreigner in 4 days there and he was at McDonalds at the station. Of course we refused to talk to each other.

LTL does 1:1 classes (I have a regular teacher from them) and provided me with a 1:1 teacher and homestay in Chengde.

They run programs in Tianjin too.

http://www.livethelanguage.cn/chinese-classes-tianjin/

[zhouhaochen]

One option would be Chengde. Though it is of course still winter there during Christmas, it is located in the mountains about two hours Northeast of Beijing and during December/Januar you should expect temperatures from 0C to -13C, which is real winter, but much warmer than anywhere in the Northeast of China during that time of the year. It is a smaller city (population about one million), with almost no foreign presence at all, and the Mandarin spoken is very standard (I would say even more standard than Beijing). LTL offers homestays and Chinese one-on-one classes there, however no groups, as it is a full immersion destination and we do not want students to hang around with other English speaking students, but instead be fully immersed into a Chinese language environment. This is a description of the Chinese programs in Chengde usually this is done as a combination course of first Beijing and then Chengde and a lot of the information on there is about that, but you can do only Chengde as well. Check here for Chengde's Wikipedia page.

It fits your requirements of 1) small foreign presence 2) native standard Mandarin 3) smaller city 4) not as cold as Harbin. However, please keep in mind the courses there are full immersion, which means virtually no English spoken at all, except emergency support from LTL, which might be different to what you were looking for.

There is a 50% discount on tuition for the Christmas and New Year week for students who start their courses in December and study at least for four weeks. You said above you only want to do 3 weeks, so it might not be apply to you, but I thought I mention it.

Please keep in mind: l and am very familiar with the courses offered there, but this is not an independent student review, as I work for LTL.

[GaoJinJie]

Thank you both for your replies. LTL Chengde sounds like it suits me well. I have emailed through the LTL website.

Given that I only have 3 weeks I do want full immersion! However, will it be a problem if I don't know too much Chinese before I go there?

[zhouhaochen]

How good a learner of Chinese should be to benefit from immersion is subject to much discussion and I am sure you will get different replies here. In my experience, you have to split it into two parts, language and cultural/social.

For language, I think that a beginner/beginner-intermediate benefits just as much, if not more from immersion as a more advanced student. Beginners are typically the people who speak Mandarin the least and are most likely to try to use English to organize their life, because they do not feel comfortable enough in Mandarin (and are often not understood when trying to explain something in Mandarin). However, this is not good for improving your Chinese. To be forced to use that beginner level of Mandarin (even if it is just to get food, switch on the aircon, ask where the toilet is etc.) by eliminating the option to get around those issues by speaking English (i.e. having a full immersion environment, where English is simply not spoken by anyone), gets beginners to practice a lot more in real life and repeat the simple phrases they learned again and again, which means better memorization and faster progress. It also motivates a beginner more to learn, because the student a) needs it and b) this environment provides room for a lot of little victories (something like: Last week I had no way of explaining to the taxi driver where I wanted to go, today I learned the sentence, used it right after class, succeeded in doing something I could not do before and therefore what I learned today immediately benefits my life.) These are the kinds of experiences that motivate people.

A more advanced student of course will of course also benefit from total language immersion, but at that level they might be speaking a lot more Mandarin in Beijing as well, just because they feel more comfortable already and see no need to switch to English, so the immediate benefit might be less, depending on the student.

Culture/social: this can be more difficult for a beginner in a full immersion environment. While it is certainly possible to make friends by using dictionaries, using your hands, and just laughing about every single misunderstanding, it is definitely harder to make meaningful friends in a Chinese only environment when you struggle with basic conversations. Also, you will simply not understand (linguistically and culturally) some of the things going on around you. It takes a lot more, patience, energy and pro-activeness to integrate yourself into a Chinese culture environment if you do not speak much Chinese. For our courses the stays are planned and organized, with the homestay families knowing what to do with a student, independently if he/she can say it in Chinese, things like transport, classes, etc. pre-organized, and a 24/7 English language emergency phone line if needed.

So I would say, not knowing that much Mandarin is not a problem for a full immersion course, however it will require you to be more pro-active and patient when making social contact. Thats my view from an organizers perspective and what I hear from our students. Maybe Tysond or someone else who did a full immersion program has more to say about that from a students perspective.

[tysond]

Hard for me to exactly compare, I don't know what your level is. My level at the time was intermediate about HSK3+. My pronunciation is far from great, but serviceable so people can usually understand what I am saying (this helped a lot).

I did a short 4 day stay in Chengde with a host family, and spent 4 hours a day with a teacher visiting tourist sites and discussing in mostly Chinese (we did use English words for translations at times, but not much else). So it was a lot of discussion of history, temples, gods, religion, emperors, etc.

But at the house for the rest of the day, discussion was about food, tea, fruit, how much you earn, how much spending money you have each month, going for a walk, visiting the shop, food, taking a nap, your school, your job, your home country, whether you are taking a shower any time soon, your age and lack of children, your weight, your plans for the day, population of your country and city (you will never beat China), that kind of thing.

Really good stuff for expanding your basic Chinese and telling strangers about your private life.

The host family are not teachers so dictionaries, photos, even showing them what you are studying can help them keep discussion going at more at your level, and overcome your pronunciation mistakes so they can understand what you are trying to say and give you feedback. It can be exhausting on you too - there were times where I was completely overwhelmed and needed to take a break. Fortunately sleeping in the middle of the day is totally acceptable, part of the culture really :-)

The outcome was that my listening improved quite a bit, my speaking somewhat - not really pronunciation, but faster responses to discussions. Also the host family looked over my studying and corrected a bunch of errors that had crept into my character writing, gave me some tips on how to avoid some of the mistakes. I felt like I had made 3-4 week's progress in a few days.

About culture - really half of what I learned was cultural. This is partially because I chose to do tourist sites with my teacher. But also living in a Chinese home has a lot of culture aspects to it. Gifts, classical literature references, watching TV together, rituals around food, exercise habits, the latest internet memes - these all are part of the Chinese psyche and after seeing them close up I have new appreciation for the authenticity of textbook dialogs or sentences that previously seemed a bit weird. This is very hard to deal with if your Chinese level is low - you have no context to figure out what people are saying, and probably won't know the names of incredibly famous places, books and films.

I would recommend learning sentences about daily life (especially listening) before you go. The 3800 Useful Chinese Sentences has lots of daily life sentences that are short but really common. Just grab the ones that you are likely to use in your daily life.

http://v.youku.com/v...Y2NjEyNTY4.html

I also found Carl Gene Fordham's "45 Mandarin Sentences with Chinese Characteristics" to be worthwhile - these sentences are super common but hard to understand if you haven't seen them before. Especially the beginners level ones which include a lot of food culture.

http://carlgene.com/...haracteristics/

http://carlgene.com/...haracteristics/

And try to follow the Chinese news a bit, so you know what is going on when watching TV (floods, heat wave, earthquake, space launch, whatever). You can read it in English and then you'll guess what's going on and can ask questions based on the shared context.

(As a side note -- I found it amusing that my host family and I were watching TV news and at one point an American came on camera speaking in rapid fire English with chinese subs. They all turned to me and asked whether I could understand his English, and when I said "Of course" they were completely shocked. Strangely, I gained a lot of respect for that).

[WestTexas]

Is Chengde worth visiting as a tourist? That's where the Qing Mountain Resort or whatever is, right?

[tysond]

Yes, quite a few interesting things to see and the city itself is pleasant. And not so many tourists (still no bullet train to Chengde).

The mountain resort ( 避暑山庄 ), and surrounding Imperial summer villa (basically a big park) - interesting gardens and history.

Club rock (棒槌峰), Pule temple (普乐寺）, and lots of other things to see - I found them pretty interesting. And things are actually laid out in a very geometric fashion (north south east west lines connecting buildings and natural structures) so it's quite fascinating and very Chinese.

Basically if you liked the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, and would like to see a different set of similar buildings and gardens, , 10 times less tourists,mountainous landscape, and that none of your friends have been to, consider Chengde.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Is Chengde worth visiting as a tourist?

From what I can tell over the distance (haven't been there), I find Chengde quite interesting and am just racking my brains about how I can stuff it into my travel itinerary. But then, I find the Qianlong emperor and his times fascinating, so I may be biased. I guess with destinations like that, just how interesting they are might lie in the eyes of the beholder?

As far as I know, the ho(s)tels in Chengde won't take foreigners, with a few exceptions, and the ones that do are expensive. So a language homestay sounds like a very exciting option.

Tysond - how did you manage to talk about temples and stuff with HSK "only" 3?! Did you prepare, like, study a cultural reader or something in advance?

[WestTexas]

Looks like I'll be making a side trip to Chengde the next time I'm in Beijing.

They have a hostel listed on hostelworld.com for Chengde, and also some places on elong. You can also get a tour bus there from Beijing.

[abcdefg]

Just out of curiosity, OP, why have you decided to limit your choices to Dongbei? Is it in order to find more standard Putonghua?

Got to say that Chengde homestay course looks like a great opportunity. I would do it in a flash, were I in your shoes.

I really like @Zhouhaochen"s balanced discussion in #5 above of the benefits of total immersion for an early-stage learner.

It's so easy to slip into bad habits, such as always hanging out after class with other English speakers. People typically think these are just temporary comfort measures, but five or ten years later they are still doing the same thing.

[tysond]

Tysond - how did you manage to talk about temples and stuff with HSK "only" 3?! Did you prepare, like, study a cultural reader or something in advance?

"Only" ... well more HSK3+, my reading/writing is broadly better than normal for HSK3, and i have extra vocab learned regardless of HSK level. But yes I was prepared. I didn't want to spend this much time and money to encounter these words for the first time in Chengde when you can find them in books easily.

I don't study vocab lists much, instead I add sentences to my SRS. After a tour in March of the forbidden city and summer palace, I realized I was struggling to discuss what we were seeing with our guide in Chinese, so I searched nciku and found a few sentences about temples, towers, emperors, etc and added them. 在你的后边能看到人民英雄纪念碑. 这做佛事就是著名的悬空寺。 他被皇帝软禁起来，过着池鱼和笼鸟一样的生活。 I picked sentences a tour guide might use. I see these sentences and have to write/say missing words in them (cloze deletion) on a nearly daily basis.

10-20 relevant items of vocabulary on a fairly narrow subject can make you look quite knowledgable (plus you can guess/ask about meanings of similar words using your framework - e.g. 皇子 is what? Oh 皇帝的儿子). My guide was a chinese teacher so she knew if we got stuck, how to explain things using simpler, common terms that I'd likely already learned - a regular guide is not so good at this.

I previously did a short review of the homestay in Chengde in this post.

[GaoJinJie]

Yes, I did pick Dongbei for the standard 普通话. I suppose that I am also open to other places if they speak good putonghua though.

This is all great information, thanks guys and keep it coming!

[abcdefg]

Yes, I did pick Dongbei for the standard 普通话. I suppose that I am also open to other places if they speak good putonghua though.

Makes good sense. Anyplace warmer in late December would indeed have accent issues.

I usually prioritize environment higher than 标准普通话, so have spent parts of a couple pleasant winters in Zhuhai. It's an individual decision. I've enjoyed Harbin in the summer. Currently live in Kunming, which provides a good compromise as to climate. I would not return to Beijing except as a tourist.

[zhouhaochen]

I rember the discussions we had many years ago when we decided we wanted to offer a full immersion course and had to choose the city to do it in. We chose Chengde as we found it the most suitable city for a full immersion program mainly in China because,

1) very good standard Mandarin is spoken there

2) it is a genuinely beautiful city & historic city

3) there are almost no foreigners there at all, not even tourists (keep it that way and do not start talking about it on some English language tourist forum please)

4) due to the mountains the air/climate is very good compared to Beijing, NE China and most other cities in Hebei

5) we had some connections there which helped us set up the homestay program at the beginning (we know have full-time staff etc. in Chengde, but thats not how it started)

It is definitely worth a trip if someone visits Beijing, even if you do not care about the immersion part, the main problems you would have to think about are transportation and accommodation. There are only two "fast" trains a day (fast means four hours, there are no high speed trains to Chengde at all) and it is much faster by bus or private transport. For our students we organize usually to go there in a shared car, which takes 2-3 hours. For accommodation, there are not that many places to stay there to start with and only a few allow foreigners (as strange as it seems in this day and age, but the city is really not used to foreigners visiting), which makes options quite limited. However, there are hotels you can stay at and if you just go for a few days, I would just not worry so much, all of them will have a bed and a shower. It is a "third/fourth" tier city, so costs are very reasonable in general there and as the city is not that big, do not worry too much where your hotel is, as long as you are in town, you can do all the sights by foot.

It is a beautiful place, especially if you are looking for a "China China" experience with a lot of history and culture thrown in. There is not a single Mc Donalds in the whole city.

[zhouhaochen]

 

dansemacabre just posted about where he ended up going and how it went here.