CET Greater China

During my year with CET, I fell in love with Harbin. It is an incredible city and now all I want to do is to go back. Our classes were challenging but always fun; our teachers were our friends and were 100% committed to teaching us to speak Chinese. We would WeChat after class, see each other around the university and the town and even eat together. It was great! Our roommates were almost always willing to take us out or to join us at bars, restaurants or even just for a walk around the town. I dated one of the female roommates, visited her home and traveled all over China with her.

There were some challenges. Sometimes a few of the students turned the study of Chinese into a competition, with the bad attitudes to match. But it was always easy to rise above it. There was some horrible pollution, but a pharmacy right down the street sold the appropriate masks. It was cold... very, very cold... but honestly, it just added to Harbin's charm!

Living in Beijing, for the most part, was the best experience of my life so far. The food was out of this world, the people were generally hospitable, and the memories you make with your friends and roommates are priceless. School work is tiresome at times and can really wear you down, and the pollution can get to your brain, but it wasn't worth sweating over. There was always someone you can hang out with to cheer you up if it got to be to much. Even your professors care about your well being and will ask how you're really doing when you're feeling down. Also, thanks to the little bit of time we had off during the semester, there was enough time to travel and see more of China. During my stay, I went to about five different cities all along the southern coast - some of them twice. There's just so much to see and do that I honestly feel I could never get bored. Also, day to day life was done in the middle of a district made up of only Chinese people. This was a nice way to really focus on bettering my local Chinese and getting to know the people around me and how they live. Honestly, I feel like BIE was just far enough away from strong foreign influence that I got to experience a part of Chinese culture that most others don't when they visit. And that was what I feel made my whole time in Beijing with CET priceless.

If I had to describe my experience in Harbin in one word, it would be intense. That definitely described the academics, which were very rigorous. The program challenges you, but at the end of it you'll have immense gains both in language skills and confidence. Also, although Harbin may not be as fun as huge cities like Beijing or Shanghai, it's not too bad either. My time at Harbin was characterized by both frantic studying and some very fun weekends spent hanging out with new friends.

CET Beijing's trademark characteristic is its language pledge. This presents a lot of challenges and anxiety to incoming students, which is very understandable. Being cut off from your home culture in a brand new country can be intimidating and terrifying. My classmates often reacted to this by speaking English to each other, which of course is detrimental to the program's success.

The success of the program depends mostly on the commitment that the students themselves make to upholding the language pledge and enforcing it among themselves.The first few weeks of the spring semester in 2014 were critical for establishing precedent for speaking only Chinese. A few students, for example, set up an "English Jar," into which students had to throw one "kuai" (Chinese unit of money) each time they spoke English.

Bottom line, this program works. All Chinese, all the time, will not fail if you stick with it. Problems start to arise when participants break the language pledge constantly.

CET provided not only a wonderful academic environment, but also a thriving social environment as well. Every day, I would have several hours of class and homework, but the work-load was not so extreme that I was cooped up in my room 24/7. In fact, I had ample time to chat and eat meals with my room mate, go out and explore the city of Harbin, and generally immerse myself in Chinese culture.

CET in Kunming has several defining features: very small class sizes, a language pledge, and Chinese roommates.

The Kunming program is distinct from other CET programs in that students in Kunming are placed in a city where very few locals speak English. This makes it easy to uphold the language pledge, and gives foreign students a sense of authentic Chinese culture, instead of being surrounded by Western influences. Furthermore, we were not overly affected by pollution, which is a rarity in modern China.

My day-to-day activities went like this: get up early to go for a run around the nearby lake (yep, you can go running outside in Kunming!). Come back, shower, and review characters for the quiz of the day. Go to class for four hours in a class of four students. Eat lunch in the cafeteria and then go to a one-on-one tutorial for half an hour. Work, either in my room, the common activity room in the dormitory, or at a local cafe. Go exploring around the campus or in the city center. Come back for dinner with friends and roommates. Work a bit more. Sleep. Repeat.

If you're looking to become fluent in Chinese, this is the only way to do it. The only students who struggled with the program were those who weren't committed to improvement. It takes dedication and hard work to get through this program, but if you have the drive, I can't recommend this experience highly enough.

CET Harbin is one of those programs where, especially if you haven't taken a language pledge program before, you may go in apprehensive or even a little scared. But everyone I know who came out of the program wish they had gone to Harbin sooner or stayed for at least another term. It really is a wonderful opportunity if your goal is to massively increase your foreign language capabilities (in this case Mandarin and the Dongbei dialect), and immerse yourself in Chinese culture. Go to CET Harbin, you won't regret it!

CET Harbin was a life-changing experience. I find Chinese a wonderfully delightful language to speak, and being able to converse with just about anyone on the street using what I learned in class was wonderful and great for building my confidence. Prior to going to the country, I thought there was only one path for me, government service and then becoming an interpreter, but going to China took off the blinders and exposed me to countless opportunities in all aspects of life. Although there were challenges, working nonstop in a foreign language can be tear-inducing at the best of times, I made lifelong friends, gained a healthy dose of perspective and ate chicken feet. Who would have guessed?