How hard is a college-level Chinese class?

September 11, 2020

I'm not referring to a class for foreigners, but a class for native speakers. What kind of assignments are there, and what is expected of international students? Taking a college level Chinese class is required for all regular students at NTU, and with my expected vocabulary to be at the average for Chinese high school graduates, I want to be as prepared as possible. I'm wondering if my difficulty in speaking will translate to a difficulty in writing, and if I can ever perform at and have the same ease in doing my schoolwork and job as a native.

Because I have no idea myself, I contacted my Taiwanese friend Tingwei (庭瑋) who was able to provide some input. He said that it's probably very similar to English classes here, and said that students often read Shakespeare and the like, so I tried to change my focus over to the difficulty of college English.

I assume college level English is somewhat similar to what I'm doing right now, but with much higher expectation and rigor. There's also a lot of writing right now in my English classes, sometimes about what we read or some other topic, and that seems like an accurate expectation for college in Taiwan.

If anything at all that concerns me, it's just having to write Traditional characters. I can read them just fine as well as type, but I can't write very many. I hope we won't be expected of too much when it comes to writing, or that for certain things I can look up the characters.

Looking ahead to be as prepared as possible is something that is certainly valuable, but I don't think it's something I should worry about or get too anxious about.