The benefits:
- You will be overwhelmed by the friendliness shown by the local people, since they don’t often see many foreigners.
- You will learn a lot more because there are fewer foreigners and hence your opportunity to speak to them in non-Chinese is less.
- The schools in a small city are usually more familial, and have a better atmosphere.
- The school fee is lower.
- You will see the real life of China - not the glamorous metropolitan life in Shanghai or Beijing
For this, I can recommend a city and a school for you.
First about the city. Wuhu, with a population of 700,000, is in the poor China province of Anhui and on the south bank of the Yangtze River. It is a little known city and located in a remote area. The fact that there is even a Chinese language school there owes to the existence of Chery Automobile, a private China automobile company owned by the Wuhu local government. Chery was founded in 1997 to prop up the economy of Wuhu, and since then the company has become one of the fastest growing auto companies in China.
Because of Chery, an English language school was founded to supply English teachers to teach staff at Chery. And hence, a Chinese language school has been born to teach Chinese language to these English teachers – a typical reason for the sprouting up of some of the Chinese language schools in China.
I will write in my next posting about the school.
4 comments ↓
Haha, after reading the first lines of your post, I thought Wuhu was a small remote town… and then it turns to have a population of 700,000!!!
I wonder how long it will take to learn Chinese by staying in Wuhu.
It depends on what level of proficience you want to achieve, and if the learners make real efforts. Generally speaking, it takes at least 6-9 months to be able to converse in Chinese in daily life.
yes, it is small city . but looks like a town compares with neighbour cities.
And just want to correct something. Wuhu is in the south of China, but it is in the east of Yangtze river. Becasue yangteze rive flows from south to north in the reach from Wuhu to Nanjing. Regarding to language school, I am not very sure it is becasue of cherry’s development. Because most Chinese parents want their children can speak good English then get high scores in important exams. And also be very keen to send their children abroad to get gold-filled education.
the benefits you mentioned are super correct. And another point is that Wuhu accent is not too far from mandarin. so you can understand local people’s talking very well even very old grandma. And it is impossible in Shanghai or Jiangsu and other southern China’s cities.
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