Studying Chinese at Harbin Universities

[wfujkramer]

I'm going up to Harbin next week (which unfortunately will be during the holiday) to rent an apartment and to enroll in university. I visitited Harbin in the summer and went to see some of the university areas but was not able to find any foreign students to talk with.

Specifically I need to know WHERE to live, since renting an apartment will be first on my list. Is there an area that most foreign students find preferable? If possible could you post pinyin with tones or characters when describing names/streets/etc.

Second, which university is best, or at the very least what are my choices? I would love to find a school that has reasonably priced private lessons, or has cheap tuition, so I could get a visa and then not care about whether the school is good or bad and find my own private teacher.... as was easy to do in Kunming.

Any information you could post about comparisons about the universities (esp. the prices of the programs) would be REALLY useful.

Thanks for your help.

John

[roddy]

All my posts on Harbin start with the caveat that I haven't actually been there for a couple of years, but . . .

The three universities that I knew of that were taking foreign students at the time were

1) Harbin Institute of Technology, 哈尔滨工业大学. This one is more central, and the university in general has an excellent reputation in China. The CET courses are based here, but unless you cough up the extra cash you'll wind up in the standard Chinese courses. Very urban campus, with a motorway running literally under the main gate.

2) Heilongjiang University. 黑龙江大学, known as 黑大 and Harbin Normal University, 哈尔滨师范大学, or 哈师大. Both about 30 minutes south of the center by bus with larger, nicer campuses.

I spoke to people studying at all of these, and all were happy enough, but as I say this is all from some time ago. I know we have people up in in Harbin now on here, and hopefully they'll be more up to date. I seem to remember students at the Normal University being slightly happier with the quality of their courses, which is perhaps an advantage of being at a university with such a focus on education - Beishida in Beijing springs to mind.

Not much information I know, but enough to get you started with some searching. Let us know how you get on.

You should also read this if you haven't already.