You have a point about education style. Most of foreign students I met here feel bored and skip classes. 

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  I studied in Guilin for about four months, had four teachers to cover speaking, reading, listening and writing, and I was only impressed with one of them; the listening lessons were just tests and movies, the writing lessons were given by a woman who should have been teaching kindergarten. She actually got people to stand at the front of the class for five minutes if they spoke out of turn (Fortunately she never asked me to because I was 40 and would have laughed my arse off and told her to sit on my face for five minutes). And the speaking lessons were just learning dialogues and then performing them. The lady who taught the reading class however was a good teacher who clearly planned carefully and made efforts to actively engage the interest of her students. Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me and I spent less and less time in class and more and more time playing Assassin's Creed on my X-Box. Big kid.

I do not enjoy, and I have made a research about it in many other universities where 95% of students pursuing their majors in Chinese language do express dissatisfaction and they happen to learn very little. Only if China decide to teach foreigners in a language they can understand it's when China can begin to attract more and more foreigners to study here in China, still yet many of the students I interviewed who pursue their majors in English language taught by Chinese teachers and lectures still complain that they do not understand their English so clear but  at least they can read the books and do their research in English and work in group to exchange ideas. this is far much better than doing it in Chinese language, note that even Chinese themselves do not know their own Chinese characters, so foreigners find it really really challenging.

and the worst of  all is that Chinese language is only taught for 8 months only then you start your major together with Chinese students in the same class, some Universities do separate foreign students in the first 6 months or one academic year.

darkstar1 stand up in the linge

Who wouldn't enjoy traveling 10,000 km to watch teachers read from text books?

i had 28 students in an english intonation class last year , 12 showed up the first day, 4 came every day , and all 28 came for the exam at the end, and of course i could not give a score below 60 for any student. welcome to academic excellence. the university did pay me on time , rather unusual to be able to say that, english majors had to attend 70 percent of classes, now thats a tough standard.happy teaching

looking Back I really wished I had done the overseas student experience

from what I have read Maybe not China in the 80s

but at least gone somewhere to learn new things

I encourage my older kids to do it  even if it is a English speaking country

I'm teaching at a relatively good university, so I suppose that's why my students seem much more enthusiastic about learning than the stories I read here. I sat in on a few different lectures to get a feel for things here, and definitely could not see the appeal of rote learning the humanities/liberal arts. Politics class once every week on Saturday morning for 12 years, and you aren't even allowed to debate or argue with the teacher? That was the best part of my polisci degree, lots of fun trying to best a professor in argumentation fisticuffs.

As I have mentioned earlier, I attend Chinese classes in a certain university. I studied Chinese back home & I always wanted to study in China. I felt was so enthusiastic & excited when I was enrolled this Sep.

 But my enthusiasm & zeal cooled off very soon.  I found that some teachers were not prepared for the class, they were just reading a book for 2 hours which bored my pants off. A young lady who was teaching Chinese literature was prepared & her classes were more interesting but I could hardly hear what she said because the classroom was crowded & she couldn't be heard even with her Mike. 

  There were 2 Korean students in the class, they were staring blankly at each other & then at their mobiles. My Chinese classmates seemed to suffer through the interminable monotony of a boring lesson, they were  engaged in texting, eating, catching Z's, reading their English books, anything but trying to follow the teacher.  When I asked them why they were not trying to be active in the class, they said, "Who cares? We just want to get the degree". I don't blame them because they didn't have the freedom to choose the major after their own heart.  

 I have come to realize that education back home is not that bad after all.

You can add me to the long list of people who don't like being taught in Chinese classrooms.

When I first came to China I actually signed up at a local university in Guangzhou so I could get a degree in Chinese language studies.  But I ended up quitting after the first 6 weeks simply because every single class was so boring I felt clawing my own eyes out was preferable to listening to teachers who clearly were phoning it in.

In one class, "conversational Chinese" I would actively try to engage the teacher in conversations (there were only 4 of us in the class by the 3rd day).  After a couple of days of me talking, in Chinese, in a conversational Chinese class, I was told to stop being disruptive and to just read the materials I was given.

That was around the time where I knew that Chinese school wasn't for me.

Well, in an international highschool in China, life is just perfect.

As BLCU student (to learn Chinese)... well the classes are incredibly boring, and sometimes (often) it feels like a bit of propaganda has been slipped here and there.

A few of my friends who studied courses like business (or whatever it is called) gave up after a while, claiming that it wasn't getting them anywhere.

In comparison to American schools, Chinese ones are nowhere near, nowhere. I studied at Tsinghua, arguably the best school in China, and I would rate it somewhere near the middle of the pack compared to schools in America.  I have studied at 2 different universities in America (one ranked top 50 and the other ranked more like 500th) and two universities in China.  I would put Tsinghua closer to my school ranked 500th back home, a lot closer.  I have no idea why Hilary Clinton is pushing for Americans to study here.  She really must not know the quality of the education systems in the Middle Kingdom.  I would be okay with it if she specified language study or work,internship, or cultural experience, but traditional academic study is not a good idea.

I sure as hell didn't.

I never did and I probably won't either...I had a friend half-chinese that took a chinese class he told me he wasn't learning anything and it was like he had to help the other students in class. The story about the shower was really frightening. The students have to share the shower and they can only use hot water between a certain time. He quit and If I joined a school like that I probably would have to.