With two years of one-on-one instruction (guided by Integrated Chinese‘s level 1 textbook) but a childhood immersed in Chinese-speaking environments as my background, my Chinese reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills have developed unevenly. Having a heritage background has largely been helpful in learning Chinese, but at times can be…

Hello everyone! This is my final video blog for my summer study program. I will be finishing my last class on Sunday and will conclude my 8 weeks study program. In this blog, I am going to discuss some interesting places that have been talked about in my textbook that…

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought enormous difficulties for doing research on Asia. Since in-person visits to archives and field work has become more inconvenient, this blog post explores alternative ways to do research. Based on my experiences of using the “Data Platform of Documents on the Sino-Japanese War and modern…

The Covid-19 Pandemic changed everything, including academic research on Asia. The disruption of international travel to Asia limited access to archives, as well as the opportunity to conduct field work. In this situation, it is important to find alternative means to get sources and do research. Based on my experiences…

Hello everyone, I hope your summer is closing on a high note. My summer studies have been progressing well and I hope you all enjoyed my video on cooking dumplings.   Currently in my lesson we are talking about a lot of places that you can take a day trip…

Early in the program, we all received a package containing some swag as well as materials for our weekly cultural activities. In this video blog, I share the crafts we had the chance to learn and try for ourselves—all while continuing to practice our language skills!   Sylvia Ngo, PhD…

Eight weeks in the TISLP was definitely flown by quickly. These eight weeks are not only the journey of learning Mandarin but also the journey of learning about looking at life through different perspectives. Each week the students learn about a different controversial topic; we talked about familiar issues like…

This blog post is an instructional video on how to make dumplings. I used a recipe that was in my textbook and part of one of the lessons I completed. The process was fun and it was a nice way to get to cook new foods and practice my Chinese…