My Shanghai experience

TLI Shanghai proved to be quite different from TLI Dalian. The staff wasn't nearly as friendly, and they kept to themselves outside of class. They were more reserved in their teaching methods. They were quite good though, which made up for anything else. 

I once again designed my own schedule. I went 3 hrs per day, 5 days per week. The first hour was conversation. I would lead the teacher in a talk, with the goal of communication only. The teacher was not to correct me unless she didn't understand. I listed all unknown vocabulary.

The second hour was listening to a podcast from CSL Pod. I would play the podcast, and discuss all unknown vocab and grammar with the teacher, recording it in a list. The dialogs themselves are quite simple, but the explanations are quite difficult, and full of useful information.

The third hour was grammar study. Yuck. Unfortunately, necessary at this stage in my studies. I made lists of sample sentences.

Every day after class I'd look up all the words in a dictionary, and memorize them. I'd also review the previous 2 days word lists, and dump 3 day old words into Anki. For the month I was in Shanghai, I learned 850 new words/sentences. This is a huge number for me. It was really tough to stay on top of all my reviews.

I met a ton of language partners at the local university. The first day I went over there, I didn't know where to go. But eventually I got up the courage to talk to some students. One of them pointed me towards a bulletin board, where I posted my request for language partners. I was quickly deluged. I met on the average of twice per day during my visit. Most were girls, and most quite pretty. I find that those factors are very motivating.

My goal for Shanghai was to significantly improve my spoken language. I accomplished this goal. Now I feel like I really speak the language; it's no longer just something on paper that looks good. What a great feeling!

Preparing for Shanghai

It's been over a year since my visit to China. I've decided to go again, and try to improve my language skills. This is the 2nd leg of my 3 country, 6 month vacation. I've chosen Shanghai because I have 3 language partners in that area. Also, I've never been there, so I'm curious. On the plus side, it's a modern, western-friendly city, with lots of people wanting to improve their english skills (that makes it a good location for language exchange). On the minus side, the local language, Shanghaiese, is often spoken instead of Mandarin. Also, it's the most expensive city in the mainland, and there are lot's of english speakers there.

My gut feeling is that this will be a really good place for me to learn Mandarin. Fukuoka and Kobe in Japan are notoriously western cities, and both of those places are more comfortable to me than Tokyo and Shizuoka, or more pure-Japanese cities. So I'm guessing the same will be true of Shanghai.

Although I haven't studied any new material since my last journal entry, I've been reviewing everything with anki, listening to podcasts, and speaking with skype language partners about 2 times per week. On this massive, 3 country vacation I'm taking, it will be interesting to see if I retained my Mandarin as well as I retained my Japanese. Unfortunately, there was a 5 month lag between the end of my trip to China last year and the beginning of using podcasts/language partners. Also, my Mandarin is much weaker than my Japanese, which may play a role in this type of retention. I feel everything has pretty much come back, but I could be wrong. We shall wait and see.