Building Good Study Habits At The Beijing Language and Culture University

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In this post I want to talk about building good study habits in order to get the most from your time at the Beijing Language and Culture University. It took me nearly all of the first semester before I began to make a shift to studying more efficiently. I was regularly skipping classes and having too much of a good time with my social life to bother that much about serious study. It's an easy thing to do in the first few months and it's also forgiveable at that stage, especially for most young people, but the danger is when you let it go on for too long and don't start to make a shift towards a better work-ethic.

If you're not careful, you can end up leaving BLCU, as I saw in many cases, with hardly any improvements in your Mandarin at all. You may as well have stayed at home as far as learning a new language was concerned. I'm not saying it will have been a wasted experience - that's not true at all - but it WILL have been a wasted language-learning opportunity, and one you might regret in the years to come.

Settling in

Of course, there's more to coming to BLCU than JUST learning to speak Chinese, although that is usually the main reason people come (see my 10 Reasons To Study Chinese At BLCU). No matter how well or bad you do in Mandarin, you will still be learning about the Chinese culture and tradition. It's as much about opening your eyes to a culture outside of your own as anything else. There's a very good reason people talk about the "culture-shock" of coming to China and how it generally takes up to three months for it to really start sinking in. Thanks to BLCU having such an international campus and Beijing itself being increasingly accessible to foreigners, the transition into life there is one that most people will find incredibly easy. The shock-value of walking past a restaurant that exclusively sells donkey meat, or seeing 'dog' on the menu, on the other hand, can take a lot longer to wear off.

A lot of people, when they first arrive at BLCU, are shocked at just how much new Mandarin they are expected to learn in class every day. Considering this, you'll soon want to come up with a productive way of committing all this new information to memory in the least possible time. That way you can still go out in the evenings and have a social life (which is partly what makes going to BLCU such a great experience) but also stay on top of your new workload. It's a tough balancing act to get right in the beginning and it will take time, especially for people who have perhaps been out of education for a few years or never been to university (both of which were true for me).

Make the commitment

Nonetheless, if you make it a commitment to do that extra bit of study every day it will make all the difference come the end of semester. That extra hour a day you put in has now added up to 90 hours more study time that will give you the edge over some of your classmates. I'm not intending this to be taken in a competitive sense, but when a lot of your friends may be struggling with or even failing the exams, you will be finding them much more of a positive challenge. You won't be as stressed and it won't leave a bitter taste at the end of an otherwise great first semester. It will also put you in good stead for the continuation of your studies in Chinese if you plan to return after the break.

So what did my experience at BLCU teach me about building good study habits? Well, for one thing, I started to understand more about how I learnt as an individual and what study techniques worked best for me. These will be different for everyone, but one I really recommend you give a try is creating your own flashcards and using them every day.

Flashcards

What I used to do was go to the Chaoshifa (a decent-sized supermarket just down from the east gate) and buy a bundle of 100 flashcards for however much they cost at the time - I think it was something like 30 RMB but I honestly can't remember. They were durable and made of card so I knew they would last for the duration of my time at BLCU. Because they were slightly too big for what I needed, I'd cut them in half, thus giving me 200 instead of 100. Each night before class the next day I would write up all the new vocabulary on them (one vocab item on each card) with the Chinese characters and pinyin on one side and the English translation on the other.

I would then sit down with the flashcards and start going through them to see if there were any characters I already recognised. Perhaps I did recognise some but now their meaning had changed or was being used in a different context. So although in these cases I wouldn't have to learn the character, I WOULD have to learn what its new meaning was. Of course, most of the vocab items would be brand new to me - at least in the first semester.

To begin with, I would just work through the pile quite casually, writing out the new character with my finger in the air (making sure my stroke-order was correct as building bad habits in this area can really hinder your progress in writing later on), glancing at the pinyin and then turning the flashcard over to check the English translation. Eventually I would start to discard cards from the pile that I was finding easy to remember and continue working on those that were giving me problems. Then after half an hour or so I might take a break and a while later challenge myself to write out all the characters and pin yin from a list of the English words, or vice-versa to produce the English from the Chinese. This system would allow me to gauge how quickly I was assimilating the new material and also ensure that I wasn't wasting my time on vocab that I already had committed to memory.

The flashcard pile would grow smaller and smaller as the evening went on and in class the next morning I would already be treating it as a revision session rather than being confronted with the new material for the first time. I found this made classes much more enjoyable and I also learned a lot more by being able to engage with the language with that little bit more confidence thanks to my work the night before. This really made all the difference in the long-run and taught me quickly that consistency is key to learning more Chinese in less time.

Electronic dictionaries

The last thing I want to briefly mention today that helped my study in Chinese significantly was downloading free apps like Pleco and KTdict C-E for my iPod Touch (they're also compatible with Android I believe). Character recognition software with inbuilt Chinese-English dictionaries like these really accelerate your potential for learning Chinese by constantly reinforcing it wherever you are. All the information you need to know is suddenly accessible right from your pocket and, unlike buying a physical electronic dictionary, it's completely free. If you don't have a smartphone or iPod then I would recommend you do invest in a good Chinese electronic dictionary which does exactly the same thing, but could set you back anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand yuan.

So these have been some of my ideas for building good study habits at BLCU. I could go on and on but I think this has been enough for one post. Do you have any ideas to share about building good study habits in Chinese?

One last thing...

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