My handsome husband studies the language of China. He served an LDS church mission in Taiwan and upon his return home decided to continue to study Mandarin. He is a Chinese major with a Business minor. There is this program called The Language Flagship. It is a national program with the goal of getting students to the language level of global professionals with competitive levels of fluency in the language they choose. They have programs with Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Portuguese and others. I'm not sure exactly how they other languages or other universities do the program, but I'll tell you what Jonathan has done through BYU.
Last year, he had to take specific Flagship classes that focused on different parts of Chinese (speaking, reading, writing, grammar, etc). He also had a tutor both semesters who he had to meet with for 5 hours each week. The tutors help the students with homework, vocabulary building, and getting their end of semester presentation ready. Each student works on vocab in their field. There are students who emphasize in medicine, accounting, business, anthropology, finance, and performance here in Nanjing with us. After that year, the students come to Nanjing University to take a couple of classes at the university in their field. So, Jonathan will be taking 3 Chinese classes and 2 business classes this semester. His business classes will be regular classes at the university. He will be in class alongside his Chinese classmates, and the entire class will be spoken in Chinese. He will do the same coursework and exams as everyone else in the class (pretty legit). His Chinese classes will be made up of people from the Flagship program. Along with BYU, there are 8 other universities represented in the Flagship program here. Jonathan will also have a tutor here he has to meet with each week (I think for 5 hours) to continue to strengthen his Chinese.
After this semester in Nanjing, Jonathan will have an internship somewhere in China with a Chinese business. The students will all be setting up their internships while they are taking classes this semester. So, once we know where we are going for the next semester, we'll let you know.
So, that is why we are here. Now, to answer the question that I get all the time, and hate every time I get it, "So, what are you going to do in China?" Well, I have an 8 month old...so he keeps me pretty busy. I will be doing fairly similar things here as I did in Provo- play with baby, grocery shopping and cooking, go to the park, try to learn as much Chinese as possible, blog about as many interesting things as I can, possibly do some teaching/tutoring on the side, go on dates with my husband, and explore the city.
Hopefully that makes sense and now you know why we are here and what we are doing. Let me know if you have any questions. I'll leave you with a picture of Peter playing with his baby wipes pack...he loves it more than most of his toys.
