CUHK Chinese Language Center

[Jive Turkey]

Has anyone here studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Yale-New Asia Chinese Language Center? I live in Hong Kong and I've been thinking about crossing the border to do a year long course. However, my wife would probably divorce me if I leave HK for so long . I originally thought I'd be able to come back to HK for weekends, but it doesn't seem like that will work out. I think I'll have to consider staying on this side of the border.

I specifically want to know about the center's advanced level courses. I've looked at their website and their curriculum just doesn't look very well planned compared to places like BLU. It seems like it might be a good place to study for a beginner or intermediate student, or for someone who wants to study Cantonese, but the things I read in their course descriptions give me the feeling that they don't have much experience teaching advanced students. Anything to share about the CUHK CLC?

[NickyR]

Hey Jive Turkey,

I appreciate that this message was very old - but I also noticed that noone answered it. I think Roddy said in a post somewhere that we should answer unanswered questions if we had something to say about them so I thought I'd post a reply.... even thought I appreciate that this has probably lost all relevance for you. But maybe someone else might pick this up if they do a search for CUHK??

I studied Putonghua for about 2-3 months (one term) as a beginner at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005. I was living in Honkers at the time and had some spare time so I did the course which was three hours a day (15 univrsity credits - think it might be called the full-time course). Obviously Honkers is not an ideal place to learn Putonghua, but if you're in Hong Kong and want to pick it up I think that CUHK CLC is an excellent place to attend.

I notice that you thought the website seemed less well organised than BCLU. I haven't attended BCLU but I have studied at the UIR in Beijing. By comparison, CUHK is a much better organised establishment. To be honest, I think that by any standards CUHK CLC is a vastly professional outfit.

The pace is a lot slower than my classes in Beijing. At UIR we do one class a day (30 odd new words and 3 or so grammar points), whereas at CUHK we did one class every 3 days. However, I think that I was better at putonghua in Hong Kong!

The classes are really well organised. We spent the first 2 weeks being drilled on the basic sounds and tones. We also learned classroom expressions. As a result, the staff were able to use Chinese in the classroom from the very start. I also think that this focus on the sounds and tones is very useful for a beginner - I think my pronunciation was better in Hong Kong. Incidentally, all the teachers are from the mainland, mainly Beijing, so you learn a standard accent without any Cantonese influences!

The classes followed a set programme (a big difference to Beijing where I sometimes turn up thinking we;ll be doing one thing, and we're actually starting a whole new topic for which I have not prepared etc etc). It works on a 3 day rotation. On the first day you drill sounds and sentences. On the second day you do more speaking, listening and reading practice. Every third day there is a character test in the first class. Then there is more reading practice. Then in the last class of the day you review the vocablulary for the next three day cycle. I found this last vocab session really useful for prep the next day. We don't do it in Beijing - all vocabulary is introduced on the same day that you start and finish a chpater. As a result, you end up in a bit of a dilemma: don't prepare and get less out of the class; or prepare and have words half memorised with incorrect pronunciation. Probably more of a problem for beginners but still....

I liked the regular tests as well. I was forced into learning them in a regimented way, and as a result I found character writing very easy. Wind on 2 years (for lots of complicated reasons I let the Chinese go for two years) and I am relearning them without any push from the school. I am getting behind with them and find them really hard.

My classmates at CUHK were all Japanese or Korean. I think we worked to all about the same standard - there certainly wasn't anyone who kept the class back by being ill-prepared. However, as the class moved slower than my class in Beijing, it didn;t really require much extra prep to keep up, so maybe this was the reason. That said, there was never a time when any of us did not know every character and vocab item that we'd been introduced to. Contrast that with my Beijing class, where we get so much vocab chucked at us that we, as a group, wuite often don't know chunks of it. I think the afternoon class had a lot more westerners in, who apparently found character writing hard. As I can assure you I do not have a very big brain, I think this might indicate a tendency to "baby" westerners (???) - something which didn't happen to me because I was the only one.

They gave us homework on the second day of the cycle: reading comprehensions with answers to be writted in characters and sheets to fill in on the new characters of that text. These were always marked and returned with comments, and the teachers took time to go through any difficulties.

I also thought the textbook was excellent: it built up vocab and characters excellently with detailed explanations of grammar points. These were quite tricky to understand, but once you got them they were very exact.

Although the three-day cycle was quite regimented, the teachers were happy to talk to us about other aspects of CHinese life so we built up other vocab too.

All in all I think CUHK was a great place to study. It combined the best of East and Western teaching methods: drilling vocab but also using interactive teaching techniques. Although I stopped studying Chinese for 2 years after the course ended, I think it must be embedded in me head, as I can still remember most of the vocab, including the tones. Can't say the same about characters, but that's my own fault really. It does go slower than Beijing classes, but I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing.... Obviously I didn't do the advanced class so I can't directly answer the question posed above - however, given that I assume that it is out of date and that this post will be more useful for someone else, I hope that's not a bad thing!

Hope this review is useful to anyone who may one day come across it. Sorry to ramble on - I do have a tendency to talk alot, something which has not diminished now that I rarely have converstaions in a language I can understand!

Nicky

[gougou]

Nicky, even though for JiveTurkey, this is probably not relevant anymore, but I'm sure it is going to help somebody else in the future. Thanks a lot for the write-up!

[roddy]

. I think Roddy said in a post somewhere that we should answer unanswered questions if we had something to say about them so I thought I'd post a reply..

That's the general idea of a discussion forum

More seriously, thanks very much. It can be mildly annoying when someone decided to reply to a topic from 2003 just to say 'ha ha, very interesting', but substantial additional information is always welcome.

EDIT: Although your email address is bouncing your mails as 'user unknown', you might want to fix that.

[NickyR]

Oooh sorry about that - expect it has been annoying you for a while. I am useless with technology. SHould be all fixed now....

[Jive Turkey]

I guess I should add some comments here since I actually took some courses at CUHK in the summer of 2004. I took two courses, one called "speaking and writing" and the other course was on business Chinese. Both of those were at the Center's Level 5 or 6 (I can't remember which).

In the "speaking and writing" course, we would write a composition every week for homework. In class, each of us would give a short talk on the topic of our compositions, and then we'd spend a few minutes discussing each students' composition. I liked the discussion part, and since all of the topics were student chosen, it was pretty student-centered. Students would also teach each other any specialized vocabulary that was in their composition/talk. I was probably better than most people in the class, so I only learned truly new vocab from a couple of really good classmates. That was fine, though, since to me the real learning happened in the discussion where you had a chance to hear and use vocabulary that you either just heard or was already within your range of comprehension but not yet in your useable repertoire.

The bad thing, IMO, about the "speaking and writing" module was that we only wrote on topics we chose. Don't get me wrong-I think it's good to let students write about what they are interested in. However, IMO, second language learners need practice writing within a range of "genres" such as enquiries and replies, academic prose or whatever. If you're only writing from your head rather than being introduced to generic grammatical and discourse structures within different types of writing, then you're just not going to be able to perform many functions with written language. In this sense, I think the Center would do well to look at some of the writing textbooks from publishers like BLCU. Or maybe they now draw from those sorts of materials.

I didn't think the business Chinese course was as good as speaking and writing. We basically just read short business articles downloaded from the internet and discussed them. We did a lot of reading aloud and the teacher would stop us so he could explain any vocabulary he thought we wouldn't know. This led to a lot of explaining since some people's range of vocabulary was somewhat narrow. It was really overload for some people and the "explaining" didn't help much. I would have liked it much more if there were some sort of exercises for the vocabulary, but all we were really given was the articles.

I'd say that the good thing about the CUHK center is that unlike a lot of mainland programs with big class sizes, you will get more attention for any problems you might have because most classes don't have more than 8 students. The teachers I had were pretty concientious and open minded, but they were very overworked. Some of them are pretty knowledgeable about language teaching, and the director of the place really knows his shit about language testing. The pilot version of a computerized oral proficiency assessment he has done for Putonghua is definitely the most valid oral proficiency assessment for Chinese I've seen.

There were a few things I didn't like about the teaching. I got to know a lot of the elementary level students and some of them complained about spending too much time on characters when they still couldn't really say anything in Putonghua. But of course that happens in most programs in or out of China. I also heard teachers constantly correcting them on what IMO were extremely petty things like not adding -er on 一點 or saying laopo instead of taitai. Students were constantly told that if they failed to add -er or used words like "laopo" outside of southern China, they wouldn't be understood. What a complete crock of BS. I learned most of my Chinese in Taiwan. My retroflex sounds are standard as standard can be but I hardly rhotacize anything and I sure as hell don't call my wife "taitai," but I've never had any trouble getting across when I've been in north China. It seemed to me that the teachers were over-emphasizing certain features of speech while students were failing, or making very slow progress toward communicating. The elementary students I knew were not getting tones very well and were mixing up retroflex sounds with non-retroflex sounds, but rather than help them sort those problems out, it really seemed to me that teachers were obsessed with certain features of northernese that aren't essential for communication.

Another thing I didn't like about the materials was that they were almost all in simplified Chinese. I can read simplified Chinese well enough, but IMO, if a school is in a traditional character environment, then it should at least try to expose its students to enough traditional Chinese for them to be able to read it. Whenever I wrote something on the board in (traditional) Chinese, the Korean students would throw a fit and protest that they didn't understand. To his credit, one teacher actually said to them "tough, you're in Hong Kong. Learn to deal with it."

The biggest problem that I think the center has is that it lacks economies of scale but still tries to produce most of it's own materials. I think their elementary and intermediate materials are alright, but their advanced materials are pretty well non-existent. They basically amounted to downloaded articles from the internet. I think that for the advanced courses, they would do better to adopt or at least adapt some materials from the mainland. Maybe they now do that.

For the time being, the CUHK center is definitely the best place in HK to learn Putonghua formally. Most of the other programs in town are staffed almost completely by part-timers. However, I wouldn't come to HK just to study at CUHK. Your money would probably be better spent at ICLP in Taiwan, CET Beijing/Harbin or IUP.