The Beijing Language and Culture University of 10 Years Ago

This is a guest post by Andreas Laimboeck, Director of LTL MandarinSchool and former BLCU student.

I started my intensive course at the Beijing Language and Culture University in September 2002, when Beijing was a very different city to today. While often frustrating, it was also an amazing experience to live and learn in China during that time.

Registration and Course

Back then there was pretty much no choice: if you wanted to learn Mandarin in Beijing you had to go to BLCU, whether you liked it or not. Getting accepted into the program was not difficult -- the only requirement was to be between 18 and 99 years old -- however signing up for it was quite an adventure. The weirdest part was the requirement to make pre-payment in person at the university two months before arrival in China. It took me a month to get an English speaking person on the phone in the registration department so that I could explain the technical and logical impossibility of doing so.

As I spoke not a word of Mandarin when I arrived, I decided to skip the placement level test and just went on the first day to the reception desk to tell them I could speak no Mandarin -- something they would surely realise themselves rather quickly I thought. After not being able to communicate in any way, the lady gave me a book, brought me into a class room and told me to sit down. The teacher spoke only Mandarin and my class mates were either Korean or Japanese who did not speak English.

I struggled quite a bit during the classes there. It came therefore as quite a relief to me when I found out two weeks later that I had been wrongly placed in an advanced class rather than a beginners, for reasons still unknown to me today. It took me only another two days to find an English speaking person in the registration department that I could explain my situation to. That person then accepted that I indeed spoke no Mandarin at all, but that university regulations did not allow for students to change levels after the first week.

After a lot of arguing and fighting, in the end I succeeded in being moved to a beginner class, where I finally started learning Mandarin -- about one and a half months after having arrived at BLCU. The best part of that class was that while there were initially 25 students, about 10 very quickly gave up trying to learn Mandarin and almost never showed up for class, so it was usually only about 15 of us. We were a bit unlucky though, as one of our teachers had decided to try to write her own beginners textbook which had not been tested or corrected yet, but which we were made to use nonetheless.

The book was rubbish with loads of mistakes, wrong translations and badly structured, and so it made studying with a real textbook in the second semester a very exciting and pleasant experience. We had one great teacher, Cong Laoshi, whom I am still in touch with today. He was fun and clearly enjoyed teaching us. The other classes unfortunately consisted mainly of rather pointless exercises listening to Chinese language tapes or memorising Chinese characters. Cancelled classes were common: on most Fridays the teachers would instead organise a "cultural activity". Usually that was a visit to some museum which was sometimes interesting but did not help with learning Mandarin.

Overall it was mainly memorisation drills during classes. I still remember the reply from one of my teachers to my question how to use "le" properly: "It is too difficult to explain to you and you would not understand anyway, so just listen to Chinese people speaking and use it like them". After that explanation I refrained from asking further grammatical questions during my course at BLCU.

Life and socialising at BLCU

Back then BLCU made most of its money not through its classes but by renting dormitory rooms to foreign students at very high prices. A bed in a very basic double room with shared showers and no kitchen cost about twice of what a whole apartment across the street of campus was. This worked very well because until 2002 foreigners were not allowed to live in the same complexes as Chinese, so foreign students had no other choice and had to stay in the dormitories, whatever the price or quality.

I was lucky that I had talked to a past student on an Internet forum before signing up, who had advised me to not stay in the dormitories. I managed to not pay for a whole semester's rent upfront -- money that was never returned to anyone as most people who signed up for the dormitories quickly found out what a bad deal it was.

Wudaokou was a very quiet area back then as they had just torn down the small bar street next to Beijing University and the only bar left in all of western Beijing was Bla Bla Bar on the BLCU campus. Although it wasn't very big, it was a fun place to go. As it was the only bar in the area, it was happening every night of the week, and with beers costing €1 each it was pretty much happy hour all week there.

About half of the students at BLCU back then were Korean with the rest a very international mix, and it was very easy to make new friends. The only thing about the social life there I did not like so much was that foreign and local students were strictly separated, both officially and non-officially. There was never a class room where foreigners studied Chinese next to a class room with Chinese students. The dormitory buildings were strictly separated so Chinese and foreigners never lived together; socially the foreign and Chinese communities just did not mix.

Bars and clubs at that time were just starting to appear in Beijing, and as foreigners we were always a bit of an oddity wherever we went. The centre of our social life back then -- like it is today -- was in Sanlitun (Chaoyang District), about a 40-minute taxi ride from BLCU. It was a little street called Sanlitun Nanjie with small single-floor buildings where bars sold 10 RMB Gin and Tonics.

The street was torn down a few years later unfortunately and today the Sanlitun SOHO shopping and office towers stand there as the nightlife moved across the street to Sanlitun Nanjie. Even more unfortunately, Bla Bla Bar on the BLCU campus went the same way a few years ago too.

Learning Chinese

During my first semester I did not progress a lot; I was placed in the wrong class at the beginning, the drill-style learning was not useful, classes were too large, and there was a lack of social contact with local Chinese students. Maybe sometimes my enthusiasm for the nightlife also had something to do with it. However,  I had also never been a very good language learner.

During the whole time I had tried to at least find an apartment together with some Chinese students. This, however, turned out to be a lot harder than I had thought. Unlike in Europe, most Chinese seemed to see sharing an apartment as simple a rent agreement with no social communication between the people living together. It took me seven months and moving four times until I finally moved in with two guys from Anhui who wanted to make friends and were happy to speak with me in Mandarin.

It was a difficult process as our hobbies and interest were very different, but living with Li Hua and Agan was the best thing that ever happened to my Chinese learning and we remain friends to this day. After a month into my first semester, the SARS epidemic started and all universities were closed.

When I returned to Beijing after a few months of traveling (and after the SARS scare was over), I decided to not return to BLCU and just get a private tutor instead. I told her how I wanted to be taught (no more memorisation drills, and I finally wanted to learn tones), spoke with my Chinese flatmates in Mandarin the rest of the day and finally managed to make some Chinese friends. That was when I could see my Mandarin improving, though it took me another year to correct my tones (which after six months of neglect were in very bad shape).

I have very fond memories of my time in Beijing back then, especially the international friends I made, the social life and the amazing experience of living in China at that time. It also helped me to understand how Chinese should be -- or should not be -- taught and what kind of studying suits me best, based on which I managed to organise courses for me that ultimately got me to fluency -- experiences I still base the structure of the LTL Chinese semester programs on.