Studying for my Third-Year Chinese final

I started studying for my Chinese final two days ago. The test isn’t until next Friday, but rather than cram like crazy a few days before, I’ve decided to only do five lessons a day (out of 25), for five days, and then focus in on the vocab and grammar that I’m shaky on.
I used [...]

Final Chinese Oral Presentation

Third-year Chinese had its final oral presentations on Friday. We were split up into groups of six, and had to give ten minute presentations on the topic that we’d written our final research paper on. Each presentation was followed by a five minute Q&A. I made mine on Powerpoint, which was a good idea because [...]

Bombed the last dictation of the semester

In third-year Chinese, we have to take a 听写 every Wednesday. The name is misleading because, unlike at Princeton in Beijing, where teachers would read out a few sentences and we’d have to write them down in characters, all we have to do here is look at sentences of pinyin and write out the correct [...]

4th year textbooks

I just got the 4th year textbooks I’ll be using at PIB this summer. They are many. I am one. I am scared.

Which type of Chinese language learner are YOU?

Looking around my Chinese class today, I started thinking about why each of my classmates was studying Chinese. This question isn’t new–I’ve been thinking about it off and on throughout my six semesters of Chinese language study. It comes up when I have to explain myself to friends and acquaintances, when talking with my fellow [...]

Essay series #1 Comparing Chinese Blogs and Big Character Posters. Part 2.

Continued from Part 1.
Unlike dazibao, not any literate person can blog. Blogging requires one to have sufficient technology, and, more importantly, because accessing the Internet (and all of the information that it is compromised of) is a prerequisite to blogging, a blogger is likely to be, on average, less parochial than the dazibao writer. Finally, [...]

Essay series #1: Comparing Chinese Blogs and Big Character Posters. Part 1.

I thought it would be interesting to post some of the essays I’ve written about China’s media, literature and culture in a set of series (so online essay sites don’t pick them up all at once and sell them to high schoolers for $30).
This first essay is one comparing Chinese Blogs and Big Character Posters [...]

Task Force #1

As you may recall, after a difficult and long decision-making process, I chose to major in international affairs and public policy. Well, one of the major’s requirements is that all concentrators take a task force each semester of their junior year, and write their junior independent work (around 25 pages per semester) on a topic [...]