INTRODUCTION

I highly recommend the University of Virginia’s Chinese program. While 
the course work is extremely labor intensive, the progress I have seen 
myself making has been well worth the effort. Four years ago, I attempted 
Chinese 101 at another institution and in comparison, I can honestly say 
that Tseng laoshi’s teaching method is far better than the program at 
other schools. She is a very demanding teacher, but it is a demand couched 
in an understanding of just what her students are capable of handling. 
The course work is set up in such a manner that different levels of Chinese 
exposure are accounted for. My class varied from American speakers with 
absolutely no foreign language background, to native Cantonese speakers and 
writers. I feel the differences have been duly noted and graded accordingly. 
I have been surprised at not just my own progress, but at the progress of 
the class as a whole. The class size is extremely small and the nature of 
the class, as both a demanding and daily experience, has engendered a great 
camaraderie amongst the students that I think has really helped our learning 
experience. In addition, the textbooks we use are extremely user-friendly 
and, speaking as one who has used less effective texts, this is an 
incredibly important feature. In summary, to anyone interested in learning 
Chinese, I would say beware of the amount of work that awaits you, but be 
confident in your teacher. If you want to learn, Tseng laoshi is an ideal 
teacher.

My Most Excellent Work

1.	Lesson 7- Studying Chinese
2.	Lesson 4- Hobbies
3.	Lesson 5- Visiting Friends

I have ranked these passages according to the fluidity of the piece. I tended 
to have difficulty constructing fluid passages because of grammatical 
structure. I feel these pieces represent my best work in combining new words 
with variant grammatical structures. I feel that Lesson 7’s narrative is my 
best use of combination subject-object structures since I depicted a possible 
conversation with another student concerning Chinese. The dialogue for Lesson 
4 is the best combined effort of myself and my partner. The narrative for 
lesson 5 is a bit simple in terms of vocabulary and structure, but it also has 
the least structural mistakes of all my narratives.

Self-Introduction:         Image File      NJ Star File     Audio File	
Studying Chinese:          Image file      NJ Star File     Audio File
Hobbies:                   Image file      NJ Star File     Audio File
Visiting Friends:          Image file      NJ Star File     Audio File