Joe
Well somehow it’s already March and it feels like there isn’t nearly as much of the scholarship left as it did in the first term. This month I have to cover studying for my blog, which I’m not very sure how to do, but I’m just going to breakdown how I study, how often I study and why it works best for me.
First off I’m going to cover how course work mixes into studying. A lot of the work we get here is very different class to class and often we’re given time in class and go over what we are meant to do. We aren't so much taught what to do, as expected to learn the material ourselves during class time. Like I said it varies class to class, and that isn’t true in some of our more vocal classes, but a lot of our work we are given we have to figure out how to do it ourselves and learn the material on our own.
The work that we get given to do on our own often consists of HSK work sheets that our HSK teacher gives to us. They aren’t very hard to grasp, as it’s just a simple work sheet which we do and hand in to the teacher the next day. We only get one of those a week but we get given multiple different work sheets from our other teachers to complete through the week. These don’t take too long to do but can be tricky.
Much of what we cover in class is done via PowerPoint presentation-style slides on the smart board which the teacher can send to the class group chats and we study in our own time in class.
Personally I’ve never really been a studious person so I try to learn as much as I can while doing minimal sitting down, because I hate sitting inside for hours. Studying doesn’t just have to be writing on paper or doing projects for class though, a lot of what I feel I learn comes from talking to people outside of the class and listening to other people speaking. I believe for learning languages writing on paper will never be as effective as actually having conversations with people.
But sadly this doesn’t hold true for learning Chinese characters as much. You can apply a more active strategy by reading as much as possible when you go out, but at my level it’s very difficult as you won’t recognise most of what you see around you. For learning characters the only way to really go about it I’ve found is consistently rote learning and writing them. You may be able to recognise a character but that doesn’t mean you can write it, so unfortunately you do just need to sit down and practice them, which takes a lot of work. Honestly I find cleaning my desk to get myself to study is just as hard as doing it.
I study around maybe 30 minutes a day through the week just writing characters and trying to learn them. It’s not a crazy amount every day but it builds up and is better than just one multiple hour studying session. The reading sessions we do in class consist of reading pieces of paragraphs each, it’s humbling when you have to try read and realise just how little you know but it’s a good reminder that you have to keep working.
Honestly the truth is studying sucks and if I could get away with never doing it I would, but unfortunately I’m on a scholarship to learn so I need to put effort in. No one likes studying but the difference you see after studying consistently even small parts at a time adds up.