Complete immersion and rapid improvement...if you make it happen.

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.