I was pleased with the overall learning environment at ABC Language Exchange and am looking forward to more classes in the future if time permits. I am glad to see that there is a wide variety of choices and different levels available. I do have some feedback that may help.
- It is really easy to start off enrolling as an absolute beginner student. The dates are available and the newsletters keep people up to date. However, the process is much tougher for levels beyond absolute beginner. As someone taking a second class after the absolute beginner class, it took a long time to get myself into a class since response times were slow for my evaluation and scheduling over email and over the phone. There are no clear dates of enrollment and no place on the web to see when the available dates and times are. If it was possible to post information on classes (languages, levels, dates/times and teachers), this would greatly increase productivity for the website and increase ABC Language’s overall enrollment.
- Books can make a huge impact on the class as well as seen with learning from Active Chinese (with web accompaniment) and Far East Chinese For Youth. Both books have their pros and cons. Active Chinese is a bit more scattered in teaching. The learning is conversation style and there is less organization in the book. However, the web accompaniment was a great help – flash version of the dialogue, audio, pdf resources of vocabulary, and the homework/tests. Chinese For Youth is more colorful and entertaining. On top of that, it is also more organized so it is easier to learn the basics all at once. However, the student is pretty much on their own outside of the book and the teacher. There is no guide unless the student purchases the $30 audio cds per book. The CDs aren’t as helpful as the Active Chinese website but it is a small outside resource that could help.
- I found that classes can differ greatly according to teachers so if there was a section of the website with reviews and recommendations of the teachers, it would be very helpful. The feedback could even be filtered by ABC Language so that nothing is overwhelmingly negative and every teacher has equal numbers of pros and cons shown so there is equal chance of enrollment.
- That being said, Mavi Graves is one of the best teachers for learning the Chinese Language. Having learned it herself as a native English speaker, she knows best the tips and tricks on how to learn words and learn how to pronounce them as well. She may not have as deep of a background with the history of Chinese but she is a great person for teaching beginner Chinese. She has a lot of patience with the students and paces them well. It was much easier to learn vocabulary with Mavi’s help. The homework was useful as well even though not everybody in the class was consistent with this.
- Wendy is a good teacher for learning correct pronounciation which is critically important in learning how to speak Chinese. She also has background information on the culture and even the history of the characters which makes her a great resource when learning about writing and remembering characters. The drawback is that Wendy is not a native English speaker and this is apparent by her accent. It is sometimes hard to understand her and it is sometimes hard for her to understand questions from students. She may also go too fast sometimes in speaking which makes it hard for students to keep up. Her teaching style is less organized so some chapters of the book may be repeated for multiple weeks and she many times begins her class with teaching random Chinese words and phrases. Since these random words aren’t used often after they are presented, they are quickly forgotten. It is harder to learn vocabulary with Wendy because not enough time is spent on learning the words. As said before, her forte is pronounciation so a lot of time is spent on that thus students gain a lot more out of this. Wendy may be a good teacher for Advanced levels of chinese where practice and pronounciation is needed the most.
- One thing that made the last class tougher to handle was the changing class levels as more students trickled in. The class started off a bit beyond my level but I eventually caught up. However, new students that showed up to class had increasingly higher levels, thus the average level of the class increased to a point where it went far beyond my skill level within a short amount of time. If there was a way to categorize levels and students (perhaps by the number of years they have learned the language), it would be better for students to keep in pace with the class. Other students at my level who started at the same time as me were equally overwhelmed with the increased level of new students to the point of deciding to discontinue taking Wendy’s class in the end. The teacher needs to maintain the level of the class to the level she started with with the students who have been around the longest.
It is my hope that the next time I contact ABC Language for furthering my studies, I will have a much easier experience finding the appropriate class for me. I fully support and recommend ABC Language Exchange and I hope that its services will continue for a long time.
