It’s now time for me to say Goodbye to China and to sum up my time here. In short:
Had an amazing time but failed to learn the language.

There are many reasons why I didn’t get past some elementary Chinese during the 5 month I’ve been here. Most of which I’m responsible for.
Too much too fast
I started with 30 lessons a week (4 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon). This was just too much for learning a language plus the speed & amount of new vocabulary at iMandarin is quite high. After 2 weeks I changed to 20h a week but the speed was still to high for me so I switched to private lessons after 2 month. But as I had fallen behind a lot and didn’t really see any progress I got more and more frustrated and demotivated to learn the language.
Bad Teacher
The first teacher I had at iMandarin was really bad. She didn’t really teach us anything. We read the text (without translating it), read the vocab and then she gave us sentence structures which she was unable to explain due to her bad english. Lastly we were given time to do the book exercises, which was a total waste of classtime in my eyes. This teacher is probably the main reason why I got so frustrated and demotivated to learn the language in the beginning. Hiring someone like this does not speak well for the school. I’m only angry with myself, that I waited so long to switch teachers.
Getting distracted
This is probably the main reason and the one I don’t really regret. China, especially Beijing really surprised me. I saw so many interesting, weird, beautiful things here, met some amazing people and had the time of my life. Some of stuff I wrote about on this blog, others are private 😉
Good Teachers
The teachers I had after my first were pretty good. However at this point I had already fallen behind too much and was strongly lacking in focus and motivation. So despite the teachers best effort (Thanks for that Jessica & Cindy) not too much chinese stuck with me.

Good Teacher – Bad Student

我的同学，我，我的老师