Language School Frustrations
I switched my Chinese language school from Red Crane to Lyceum. There’s not a lot of choice in Melbourne as far as adult education goes. I investigated doing a proper academic tract with a Uni or a TAFE but again not much choice, very hard to find info and the times were particularly unsuitable. Lyceum had an ‘intensive’ class for near 3 hours, which I felt was a better fit. So far it has proven to be better. My classmates are genuinely enthusiastic and trying their best in stark contrast to the previous school. The course work is much better with integrated study of written Chinese in a way that’s very good I think.
However my experience so far indicates that it’s mostly about the teacher and adult education tends to be populated by well meaning but less experienced/qualified tutors. I’ve also chosen the wrong level to go in, knowing probably 3/4 of the content already. On the other hand it’s still very useful to actually speak and form sentences which is an entirely different and worthwhile study endeavor from my own study which tends to be vocabulary based. So it’s okay and I like being in a class with people eager to learn Chinese enough to get over the disappointment of the pace. It’s actually a kind of useful excersize for me too because I have a tendancy to appear as a know-it-all at the best of times and I’ve treated this as practice in getting past that. Well, I’m trying anyway.
Status wise, I’ve gone from zero to hero in written Chinese. Given I did my whole first semester pretty much deciding I didn’t want to write Chinese, I’ve been studying hard on the train and reading/writing Chinese to pen friends. I actually enjoy this most than spoken and find it frustrating I can’t hand-write Chinese so that’s probably the next step.
One thing is for certain though. Next semester I will need to up the ante by either finding some proper academic course to suit or by just jumping to the end of the adult education stuff and swotting up on all the stuff in the coursework up to that point (which wouldn’t be hard). I’m becoming intensely aware of the fact that what I really need to do is actually spend time in China… Since we’re two people living on my Australian wage right now and I’m at the beginning of a fresh career tack which I’ve been trying to do for many years it’s very difficult to see how that will be the case any time soon so I just need to deal with it as best I can.
