Arts1450 course Non-background Chinese speakers 1. My honest opinion of the course.
I wanted to make this post so I can inform other people about what this course is like, as I found not a lot of people talk about it. I will say that I dropped the course before the census date, (like in week 4.) so I’m only basing my opinions on that.
Pros:the teachers are very engaged and they call upon the students to speak in mandarin, and they encourage students to try and speak in the language.
The textbooks and workbooks are good in having a mixture of translating, speaking, grammar rules, and listening to audio in mandarin to ask questions or answer them. This greatly helped improve my mandarin.
Some students in there do know mandarin as a heritage language, so they can help you with the work if you’re friends with them.
If you have some knowledge of Japanese or maybe Korean, there are some things in mandarin that will cross over. I.e san in Japanese means three, same in mandarin.
Cons:
This course was so fast paced. It was at breakneck speed, like every week we had to learn a whole page of vocabulary, sentences, grammar, Chinese characters (called Hanzi) and pinyin. (Which is the use of the Roman alphabet to write Chinese characters)
Keep in mind, mandarin is one of the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker, so having to learn and remember all of this every week was very hard.
Not to mention the tones and pronunciation being bard to.
Suffice to say, it’s a very sharp learning curve from going to learning the basic tones in week 1 to then writing completely in hanzi for our first mid-term exam in week 4.
There were many students I found in the tutorials who were heritage speakers, which was probably because for them it was a easy WAM booster.
But the problem with that is of course they were going to be at the top of the class with their marks, so for people like me who doesn’t know the language at all I can’t compete. And they really shouldn’t have been in the class. This class was for non-heritage speakers.
Part of the reason the course could have been fast paced is because UNSW has the ten week trimesters so they have to shove everything in a short amount of time and finish the level one textbook and workbook, but it’s too much to do in a short amount of time.
I had a mandarin tutor helping me with the work, and even she said that the textbook and workbook is too advanced for someone completely new to the language. My Chinese friend who is a native mandarin speaker also said the same thing.
Keep in mind I was trying my absolute best to keep up, I had tutoring nearly every day, I did all the work on time, and I showed up for classes and asked questions about what we were learning occasionally. It wasn’t like I wasn’t trying.
So TL:DR a very fast paced course that you had to work consistently on if you didn’t want to fall behind, and the learning curve was very steep to basically immediately read the hanzi. I recommend this course if you have some knowledge of the language or you can keep up with fast paced language courses.