I think the intensive reading approach has some merit, but to really improve reading skills extensive reading is essential.

I agree completely. I guess the difficulty is that there really aren’t any extensive reading materials made for CFL the way there are for English. OUP, Longman, Penguin and even Caves books all have their own series of graded readers, but I’ve never even heard of anything like that for Chinese. With all their other publishing efforts, it’s too bad Shida hasn’t started working on their own set of graded readers.

Yes they do. I studied at Shi Da for 7 semesters. Your mileage very much depends upon being placed in a class taught by a teacher that you learn well with. The great thing about Shi Da, in my opinion is the insane number of classes being offered throughout the day at nearly every level.

Your plan to sit in on different classes during the first week of the upcoming semester is definitely a good one. I did that too, when I first got there. I decided to stick with the fourth teacher whose class I sat in on. (You know you’ve found a potentially awesome teacher when you find out that the other students in the class have been requesting the same teacher for a year running). I, along with the rest of my class, ended up sticking with our teacher for two years. There were people in my class who were learning from Shi Ting Hui Hua 1 and went all the way up to the Newspaper book 2.

Those were good times. One of the reasons we the students loved our teacher so much was because of how much time was spent arguing/discussing random tangents every single day. Dinosaurs, geography, etiquette, foreign affairs, television, movie stars, clothing, marriage, superstitions, beer, etc. In Chinese.

But then again, there were definitely times that I wish I had a strict, writing-focused, Chinese teacher. Some of my classmates had had a teacher like that previously, and had benefited immensely. I often feel that my grasp of the Chinese language is “fuzzy”. I was a master at writing Chinese answers to a series of Chinese questions on a one-page Chinese article…. but an utter failure when it came to any other kind of test.