~Kevin
Summarizing the eight weeks of a life-changing trip to China is nearly impossible -- in English. Speak to me in Chinese, however, and you’ll realize exactly how much my Chinese skills have improved. While most travelers to China spend a couple weeks flitting in and out of popular and overcrowded tourist destinations, some choose to enrich their historical knowledge and cultural understanding, and others devote their days to mastering new Chinese grammar and qvocabulary. As a CET student, I had the opportunity for all three at once.
My one goal in China was to dramatically increase my Chinese language skills, which is exactly why I selected CET. After spending just one week at the surprisingly comfortable BIE campus, I could feel my listening comprehension skills improving considerably. And after three weeks, I noticed amazing progress in both my speaking efficiency, tonal accuracy, and grammar/vocabulary usage. With each passing day, the effort I had to put into thinking about and phrasing sentences in Chinese gradually decreased, and by the end of only eight short weeks, I was able express myself almost perfectly with relatively no trouble.
How did such a remarkable improvement come about? Allow me to take you through an average day at CET. After waking up at the fairly early hour of 7 am, you head off to the building next door for four hours of intense but highly entertaining Chinese language courses. The first two hours consists of meeting in “Big Class,” where you participate in dictation exercises and learn all of the new grammar and vocabulary for the day. During the last two hours, we split into “Small Classes” where another teacher would drill you on the materials you just learned. Sometimes we would even watch classic Chinese films relevant to the day’s lesson, or use our new words by singing along to Chinese pop music. I still remember the lyrics to all of the karaoke songs we belted out with our teachers.
After class, we would all head over to the CET cafeteria together, and enjoy a tasty and free lunch together with our teachers. If you wanted to sit with the teachers and discuss the day’s lesson or their likes/dislikes about China, you could. If you felt like planning a weekend trip with your classmates, you could. Don’t forget, every conversation must, and did, take place in Chinese, and nothing but. Once finished eating, we would each attend individual 1-on-1 sessions with our teachers, where we had the unique opportunity to spend 30 minutes discussing either the lesson material or a topic of our choice. These short gatherings quickly became many students’ favorite part of CET, and personally I would’ve skipped three full meals for the opportunity to have another 1-on-1 session. To wrap up the day, I would spend a few hours finishing up my homework, and quickly preview the next day’s lesson. At night, we would go out on the town with our roommates and fellow classmates, where Chinese is a must, since most roommates thankfully cannot speak English.
By now, the motif of CET is clearly obvious: from learning new material in the classroom to practicing with your teachers at lunch, from working alongside fellow classmates to chatting with Chinese roommates, repetition is key. While so much repetition might seem boring and tedious, the variety of methods makes it seem as if you’re not even practicing the language, but simply “living” it. After a few weeks of this pattern, I felt as if using new grammar and vocabulary wasn’t even a conscious decision, it just flowed naturally, mixed in among my other speaking patterns. Before I knew it, using Chinese became so natural that practicing the day’s lesson wasn’t so much of a chore as it was a fun pastime.
Between the language pledge, the non-English-speaking roommates and teachers, the Chinese-only lectures, the very low student to teacher ratio, and the multitude of language levels custom-tailored to each student, it’s obvious that no other institution has the unique structure and learning possibilities. While such language learning opportunities are enough to admire the program’s qualities, the real value of CET lies outside of the classroom. With such small classes, and every student living in the same building, developing close friendships with your classmates is inevitable. I formed closer friendships in two weeks at CET than I have back home in a full semester. The weekend trips/activities further cemented these relationships; nothing builds a friendship like being stuck on a 17-hour train together in the heart of China’s countryside. In 20 years, my memories of China might be faded and fuzzy, but the strongest and clearest ones will stand out -- the ones of the friends I made at CET, friendships that will last a lifetime.
