broad minded » impressions of China

The semester begins slowly and I have finally chosen my courses. Since the coverage of courses in English language is rather poor here, I can only attend two of my four needed courses in English. For my course Statistics I could decide between an English course that is not related to my field of study (since it is statistics for engineers, not for economists) in English and a course with the right content but completely in Chinese. So I chose neither of those options and am going to write this exam in Mannheim when I am back. The last course I need and also one additional course I am interested in (”Commercial Bank Management”) are mainly in Chinese, but I can use English material to prepare for exams in English for these courses. When I visited Commercial Bank Management today, I also met a Chinese friend of mine, Luo Qi, who friendly agreed on helping me with the most important Chinese vocabulary for this course. So I hope that with preparing the lectures with an English book and each time getting some new vocabulary from Luo Qi, I can maybe understand a bit of what the professor is saying at the end of this semester. We will see

The last course that I chose to take is “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, also just because I am interested in this topic. Several students recommended this course, because it is mainly composed of successful entrepreneurs (”Unternehmensgründer”) who are invited to hold speeches and discuss with the students afterwards. Unfortunately it is all in Chinese and there is no textbook (or at least not an English one). So I will try to get some Chinese students helping me with this, when this course begins in three weeks.

Therefore, up to now, my time schedule looks quite empty. There are only five blocks a week I can go to and Friday is free. But my Chinese courses are still missing. This is because the University currently organizes new courses at Minhang campus (where I stay) from this semester on. These will be attendable for six academic hours a week, but the language courses at Xuhui campus would include 20 academic hours a week. This would be fine if I would have to drive there every weekday by subway or bus for 45 minutes each track. Tomorrow I am going to get to Xuhui with Georg and Achim to ask about my choices regarding language courses in this semester.

Beside from attending some courses I went to have lunch or dinner with other students, watched Prison Break with Monaf (my roommate), played guitar or Badminton, worked on my Warcraft III map (computergame) or learned Chinese (in addition to words I learned when I was with other students). I especially enjoyed meeting Luo Qi for lunch, who studies finance and was exchange student to Mannheim last semester and now also introduced me to two friends of his (also having been exchange students to Mannheim).

This week I started to learn “Southern Girl” by the band Incubus on guitar (by the way, did I ever mention that Incubus rules?! ), which is this song:

When I advanced with all parts of the song, I will post a video here of how I play it (so stay tuned)

And since you wanted to see some more pictures of the campus I just took a whole bunch of pictures, sequenced them and added sound (call it “video”):

Last but not least, some pictures I still found on my cam or received from Monaf:

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under English (英文), Shànghăi (上海). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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