Soaking up Summer Camp Chinese 101

This summer around Beijing, there are a wide range of camps that both Chinese and foreign students can partake in, either for academic enrichment or for fun.

While Chinese students spend their days trying to learn as much English as possible, foreigners are busy scribbling down thousands of Chinese characters as they attempt to cram in as many as possible before returning home.

Andrea Hunt has more:

At Beijing Language and Culture University, the Rich Center is holding intensive language courses for foreigners. These short-term foreign students come to Beijing and immerse themselves in the language and culture of the country for a few weeks during the summer.

Helen Ha has been helping to organize these foreign student summer camps for the last two years. It's commonly accepted that being around English native speakers helps Chinese students improve their oral ability at the capital's numerous English camps. Ha points out that the Chinese camps work in much the same way, except with native Chinese teachers benefiting foreign students.

"Because some of them learn some Chinese in overseas country but they don't really have a chance to talk with Chinese people so they have a chance to come to China and to communicate with Chinese people and some of them, maybe they know Chinese language is important but they never learn so they want to come here to know what is China and decide they can learn Chinese or not and also they can know some Chinese culture here."

Seventeen-year-old Steven Winegar is from Madrid and is attending the Chinese camp in Beijing for the first time, even though he's already studied in Shanghai on several other occasions.

"I'm Spanish, and I've always lived in Spain but I go to an American school and I'm studying Chinese because my sister is Chinese, she's adopted, she's ten now and she came when she was 18 months old. And my parents wanted to keep part of the culture but also because I'm good with languages and I feel that Chinese is going to be important."

Sixteen-year-old Ana Steshenko is from Moscow and is studying for the first time here in Beijing. She is also studying Chinese for similar reasons, she says.

"I study Chinese because I think it's very important to know the language, nowadays, it's as important as English is, for me it's very interesting, the way it sounds, the characters, I really want to learn Chinese."

All of the students on the course believe that studying Chinese will benefit their academic life and future career. Even so, each was honest about the difficulty of learning the language, as well as the specific challenges it posed.

"-For me, it's definitely the writing, I don't study it in school, I study it at home so I don't have the continuous work to keep the writing up. That's what I find most difficult.
-The writing and also the pronunciation. I find my pronunciation is better when I'm not thinking about it.

-I think speaking for me is harder, I understand everything mostly, but to say it, I just lose my words and I don't know how to say anything. "

The students on this particular course started out with a trip to the Shanghai Expo, followed by intensive classes for the whole 3 week period.

Jackson Borchardt from New Orleans gives an insight into a typical day at camp.

"Seven days a week, we have to wake up early, they have to wake up earlier than I do I guess because I have to go to breakfast here, I live off campus. Class starts at 9, ends at 12. From 12 until about 2:45 we have a lunch break, then culture class until 5. We can usually do whatever after that, but we usually like to nap because we are kind of exhausted, nap then homework."

In spite of the intensity, the students all said how much they thought they benefited from the camp.

Chloe Lautier is half French and half Spanish, but has grown up in Hong Kong where people speak Cantonese or English. For her, this is the perfect opportunity to practice Mandarin in the standard dialect of Beijing.

"I must say going to the city and being able to speak to the people there and to communicate and exchange ideas. Being able to debate with them or to order food, and realizing how amazing it is to be able to speak Chinese when you're in China. Because it must be really hard to learn Chinese when you're not even in a Chinese country, must be really distant, so when you're here you can actually practice your Chinese and learn what you know, what you don't know and how you can communicate with people.

In Beijing, the summer camps are filled with both Chinese and foreign students eager to learn more about other languages and cultures. These days, it's so much easier to study abroad than even a decade ago.

It is this new and bright generation, propelled by the positive aspects of globalization, that links cultures and countries; that will one day be mediating between nations and deciding the fate of the world.

If it is this generation of curious and ambitious Chinese students, together with those international students devoted to China, who will form a bridge between the PRC and the rest of the world, then perhaps we are in good hands after all.

For CRI, I'm Andrea Hunt