I’ve written it out before,
but just basically, in a nutshell, they’re only happy when they’re taking your money.
They have no concept of customer service. Teachers are gods and thus need to be treated as such even though I pay hard earned money.
In upper levels, they’re more concerned with niche Chinese cultural concepts over giving people a good basis for independent living/working. For example even though you’ve hit book 5, you know how talk about the olympics, yet have almost no independence for everyday things like newspapers, workplaces. You know at most a few colours and almost no shapes and other basic things like that are largely ignored.
When I complained, they kicked me out.
I was harassed by another student and they protected her by trying to move me out of the class.
When I was sick as a dog with gasteroenteritis, like, I was diarrhoeaing every 20 minutes. Not only did they refuse to let me take a leave (threatening to pull my student ARC) but tried to move me out of the class cause I couldn’t keep up while I felt like I was dying. Other students found that I was a disruption to them because I didn’t want them pushing the teacher to go faster than the curriculum in a non intensive class while I was seriously and dangerously ill AND working a part time job to afford it.
No matter if I was the ‘problem’ or victim, admin often picked on me.
Upper level classes usually mean westerners drop out because they run out of funds. Your classmates will be only Asian, meaning they have a head start and none of them will likely be the type to practise like the way Westerners do, instead getting 90s on tests because that’s all they know how to do, test. Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese in particular have a head start on cultural understanding and the Koreans and Japanese have head starts on character learning. So if you’re not a 90s student, the teacher will resent you for pulling down the average.
Oh don’t worry, Many, if not all of my Japanese classmates couldn’t speak worth shit. Because they didn’t practise and the school doesn’t value phonics or phonetic training…something that I excelled at. Taiwanese frequently note how weak my accent is in Taiwanese Mandarin.
My Chinese friends think my Taiwan Drawl 臺灣腔 is absolutely hilarious.
Exams are 1 hr and all of your learning may be centred on a single sentence for an entire unit/chapter. If you forget a character, all of your training is no longer represented. It’s not forgiving. You either have to be a 90s student or guess correctly. It doesn’t actually represent what you learned.
Japanese student: Laoshee! Laoshee! Tianchee Tai Le!
What do you mean the weather is happy!