People who learned Chinese as a second language, how did you do it?

Just suffer through it. Life is hard, what do you expect?

In the literal sense of the question, I took online classes.

Five hours of classes per day, five days a week, seven months, not counting the hours put into doing regular homework. The usual holidays and weekends off, of course.

Since my country of Papua New Guinea was two hours behind China, classes ran a little late into the day for me.

We used an app called ClassIn. We took classes, copied down notes, submitted homework, held school meetings – everything was done via ClassIn.

It was just 中文 Zhongwen (the Chinese language) for the first semester. In the second semester my curriculum included Maths and Physics as well. Basic high school level Maths and Physics, but in Zhongwen. This is a screenshot I took during a Physics 物理 class.

That’s me in pink, teacher in the far left. Going from me to the right, my fellow students from Philippines, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, and Nepal respectively.

Here are snapshots of what our e-whiteboard looked like.