CHIN10005: Chinese 1

Two short tests (Week 6 and Week 12) 20%
vocabulary test (throughout semester) 10%,
oral test 10% (5 minutes, in week 10)
listening comprehension test 20% (30 minutes, week 10)
2 hour examination 40% (during examination period).

80% compulsory attendance

This is a pretty chill breadth to take even if you're not completely interested in pursuing Chinese studies seriously. The staff are all really nice and they'll crack a lot of jokes during the class so the atmosphere is always very warm and fun. As an avid language learner who really wants to be proficient at a language ASAP, I found that the pace was a little too slow but since it was for beginners with absolutely zero learning experience I can understand why the pace is that way. They take attendance every lesson and you need at least 80% attendance to pass.

The textbook is a requirement because all your vocab tests are based off that book, and you read through the texts every week so you'll be severely disadvantaged if you don't buy one. In previous years they covered a total of 10 lessons in the semester (roughly one every week) but after listening to the student's opinions they reduced it to only 5 lessons (so one every fortnight). On one hand I find that this is too little since the grammar is pretty easy to follow, but on the other there are about 50 characters to learn in each lesson so having to memorize 50 characters every week would be hell. The expectation is to learn 250 characters each semester anyway so if the staff found a way to finish 10 lessons in the semester with a total of 250 (rather than 500) characters learnt then it would be at the perfect pace imo.

In this subject there aren't any lectures but there are seminars where you basically sit in a class of about 20-25 students; in seminar 1 you have Du laoshi and in seminar 2 you get Jin laoshi. Personally I found seminar one to be quite boring and pointless up until midway when Zhang laoshi took over the 2nd hour of the seminar. Basically all you do in this one is read the Chinese texts in the textbook, where Du Laoshi reads it first and the class follows after. He'll then go over each and every word in the vocab list, explaining radicals and what they mean (boring). He'll then put up his grammar notes onto the projector for the class to read, which just explains what they are and how to use them. Roughly in week 6, Zhang laoshi takes over the 2nd hour and this is where Seminar 1 starts getting useful. Sometimes she'll have the class read over the texts again which can get really boring but then after that you'll start doing worksheets to apply your Chinese which are incredibly useful.

In the practicals you do listening exercises and vocab tests. The first few weeks you just do activities to train your ears in listening to the tones and phonetics of Mandarin. In about 2 pracs we watched Mao's Last Dancer (subbed, obviously) and in another we watched a doco on dumplings. I wish these were non-compulsory classes because I would've not gone had it not been for the compulsory 80% attendance requirement. The vocab tests are pretty easy, Zhang laoshi will tell you which characters of the vocab list she'll test you on but on the actual vocab test there'll only be 10 words. You do 5 in the semester, about one every fortnight. I've seen people sit at the back and look on their phones the characters that they don't know on the test - quite sneaky but it's 2015 and it happens(and I don't endorse it either!).

Finally, seminar 2 is held with Jin Laoshi. I think he is a really great guy, very funny and very approachable. Some lessons you will pair up with another person in the class and write up a script to a roleplay based off the text in the book and then present it. Although a good activity to socialize, I didn't find it all that helpful in learning Chinese (maybe to practice pronunciation or something idk). In other lessons he'll have a list of about 10 grammar points or grammar words on the board and all you have to do is make sentences with them. He'll ask every person what their sentence was and make any corrections if necessary. These don't really take up the whole 2 hours of the seminar but he'll dismiss the class early anyway.

To do well in this subject all you've got to do is consistently revise your characters and know the grammar. I did Japanese in high school so learning characters was familiar to me since one of the Japanese alphabets derived from Chinese characters. If you leave all the character revision to swotvac you're going to have a pretty horrible time and probably won't remember all of them. The key is to do the 'drip method' - doing just a little bit of revision consistently each day. At the start of semester they upload on LMS worksheets for you to practice characters. It's tedious, but once you overcome that you'll ace the subject. Just keep practising writing them and eventually you'll be able to write them without even thinking about it due to muscle memory.

As for assessments, they were all pretty easy except for the listening task. The short tests is basically one double-sided work sheets which could include anything from circling the correct sentence, to pinyin or to translation. Again, just know your characters + grammar and you'll do fine. For the oral exam there'll be three facedown sheets with the texts from the textbook but ONLY Chinese characters with no pinyin. You pick one and read it aloud. Pretty easy assessment if you just practice and learn the texts from the book off by heart. For the second part the examiner will ask a few basic questions that you have to answer in Chinese and that'll be it.

Throughout the semester you get two spoken assignments which are unassessed but are meant to help you with your pronunciation. It took the staff quite a while to give feedback on the first one, and I didn't even get feedback for the second one so that was pointless.

All in all this is a pretty good breadth to take. The bulk of the work goes into learning/revising the Chinese characters so try not to save them all to swotvac. Lots of assessments but they're all pretty easy to do well in so getting a good mark in Chinese 1 shouldn't be a problem. That's all I can think of for now so if you have any questions feel free to PM me.
I'll come back to this later with info/tips on the exam after I've done it

N/A

Dr. Du Li Ping, Zhang laoshi('teacher' in Mandarin) and Jin Laoshi

About 3 from 1998-2000 but they're not relevant to the current course

3.5/5

Wu Zhongwei,Contemporary Chinese for Beginners (Textbook), Sinolingua, 2010.

2 x two hour seminars, 1 x one hour practical

2015, Semester 1

Not Yet Received

50% final exam, 20% listening exam, 15% MST, 10% oral exam, 5 x 1% vocab test

Great subject for anyone wanting to learn Chinese. You learn around 20-30 new characters per week. The first 2 hour lecture covers the pinyin and writing of the new words for the week. The next 1 hour listening class involves listening to a recording and completing a question sheet. Vocab tests are held at the end of this class. The final 2 hour lecture covers speaking involving role plays etc. Lectures were held in classes of about 25 students so it was easy to ask questions. Classes were very laid back and enjoyable but you had to put in heaps of work learning the new words in order to do well. The assessments were easy so try your best to get full marks in all of them since it is likely that many others are getting high marks and the overall grade will be scaled down. Overall, it was a great distraction from my busy uni life, had a manageable workload and many pretty girls to look at

No

83% (scaled down by approx 12-15%)

None, exam outline provided.

3.5 Out of 5

Chinese text (compulsory)

2 x 2hr lectures, 1 x 1hr listening class

2011, Semester 1