<p>Well ive posted a few times in the past with no response.</p>
<p>How is the East Asian Studies Department? Most importantly Japanese? Chinese too?</p>
<p>Is the instruction great?</p>
<p>Anybody ever studied abroad?</p>
<p>There is a summer program where you can go to the McGill-affiliated language school in China</p>
<p>im not really interested in study abroad in china. Mostly just japan. but i do want to take mandarin while im there though</p>
<p>Instruction? You realize this is McGill and not Williams, right? Instruction is horrible across the board, and proffesors are totally inacessible. Class sizes are huge in any of the humanities disciplines. TA's grade arbitrarily, with everyone getting a "B"=range garde regardless of effort.</p>
<p>Most Canadians are baffled when Americans come to McGill for the academics. </p>
<p>Dude, who cares? Just keep your GPA up, save for grad school, and party-this is a party school first and foremost. Classes are very hard, but not that time consuming. </p>
<p>There's usualy two exams a semester, both of which you just cram for. The school is too poor to assign homework/essays most of the time since they don't have people to grade it. So you spend the week getting drunk, generally.</p>
<p>I have friends in China right now, and they're having a blast.</p>
<p>thats not really answering any of my questions.
And how small are language classes? Cause im pretty sure that they arent huge. No language classes are ever supposed to be huge.</p>
<p>In first and second years, Mandarin classes have a grand totoal of 30 students. No seminars. Meets 5x a week for about 50 minutes for 4 credits. Levels 3 and 4 meet for an hour or about an hour and a half hours either 3 or 4 times a week for 3 credits. 15 students in a class. </p>
<p>S will be starting at McGill in Sept and plans to major in EAS. I'll let you know in a few months what he thinks about it.</p>
<p>He has spoken to an EAS professor or two over the phone. They have been nothing but helpful and interested - in fact he "took" his language placement exam over the phone after a 25 minute conversation. He also has gotten quick replies to emails getting overrride codes for overenrolled courses, etc.</p>
<p>Thats good. I don't think that is really that bad then. With Japanese i will hopefully be placing into level 3, but mandarin 1, but i don't think 30 can be that problematic can it. I mean i guess you get a little less individual time than if ur class is 10 students. I had 30 for spanish in high school and it was fine.</p>