3rd week

Third week of class at Shida is over, 4th week to beging tomorrow. Oh my god, didn't I just write about the placement test and stuff?! Crazy!

As mentioned before we started with the 2nd book last week. Instruction has also changed with that book. In the first book we talked about every single new word in the vocabulary and would have it written on the black board. Now we just quickly rushed through the vocabulary section of the first chapter and our teacher asked us to learn the new words at home. I like that approach much more than spending a lot of time in class for looking at the new vocab and trying to remember it directly in class.

From what I can tell for now the second book is really more challenging than the first one. We just went through the first chapter but that already has a huge grammar section that introduces a lot of new sentence structures.

Pace of class is still okay, if not a little too slow for my taste. But I guess that is due to the number of students in class. I feel that 9 students is really not the optimal size of a class. And if I had to criticize one thing of the Shida Chinese course, it would be just that. But as I also mentioned before, Shida offered us to change classes but nobody wanted to do so. Well...our own fault then.

I started to think about taking the intensive class next semester, which would be 3 hours per day instead of the 2 hours of class that I attend every day now. I haven't decided on that yet but I might really do it. The 2 hours are just over soo soon every day. And one more hour of Chinese language goodness everyday...hmm, hard to resist! :)