the Price of Chinese Lessons

I took lessons as a class through a local college, which included meetings three times weekly with a native speaker of Chinese, plus online support, quizzes, and projects. My classes was really small - only about five people, which I think was intentional. We learned the language through speaking it with the native speaker, which was really cool.

The class was on campus and easy to find. My teacher/language person was really, really friendly and encouraged us to talk about our daily lives in Chinese, like opening each class by asking what we'd done the previous weekend or something like that. Learning was kind of an interesting experience in that we didn't get any serious exposure to grammar structures other than our teacher going "no, that's wrong, say it this way instead." It was a little confusing, but always fun and rewarding.

For me, taking a course through a college seemed like a logical thing to do - it was right there and available for me, and it felt more legitimate doing it that way, rather than sitting at a computer with instructional CDs or something. I learned a lot of vocabulary and constructions that were personally useful to me, which I think was the bonus for going to a live, intimate class.