Pedantry

Taipei Language Center Shanghai - help!

Okay, I need a little help. The place I wanted to go in China for the summer is full, and I'm looking elsewhere. I'm thinking hard about this place, the branch of the Taipei Language Center in Shanghai. The problem is that it's not entirely clear to me what they are offering. I sent and e-mail asking, and here's what I got back.

thanks for your mail! This is Hongqiao branch. Except for group courses plan for students from abroad , which you see on (http://www.chinese-center.com/eng/PresentRecruit.htm), we also offer fixed group courses lasting for 3-4 months. see http://www.chinese-center.com/eng/E_course.htm . as to those classes, we will open new ones as soon as 3 students regist the same level. but for individual course, you could regist any time while we could arrange for you in 2 days. you may first send registration fee to our bank account, while send us your registration form as well as your schedule for Chinese course. ( We opens 7:00am-9:00pm, whole days of the month) As to the apartment, all of our 3 branch schools could help you to find suitalble apartments as to your requirments. we Hongqiao could recommend an apartment, named the Couch Hotel, offer daily service, 2 km from the school, the price is RMB 4000/month. (RMB 150/day) you may see http://www.chinese-center.com/eng/E_contact_hq.htm. you may also visit the page of Pudong http://www.chinese-center.com/eng/E_contact_pd.htm, and Xuhui http://www.chinese-center.com/eng/E_contact_xh.htm to see the prices and surroundings. As to the visa, we only offer student' visa for full time students( 700hours/year). If you apply for visitor's visa to China, we could extend visa for 3-6month for you.(the charge is about RMB 500-600).

Now, I think this means that they want me to sign up for the classes on this page rather than the slightly cheaper ones here, which are only scheduled for two weeks in June. Furthermore, I guess this means that as long as there are at least three students who want to take the classes I want, there's no problem staying all summer, since I can just keep getting my vistor's visa adjusted. But, if there aren't enough students, then I have to do indivudual classes at 124RMB per hour, which is more than I can really afford.

Any insight? Anybody with suggestions? I looked at BLCU - the best known school for what I have in mind - but it seems that I can only get in about 8 weeks of scheduled classes given the schedule they've posted, at 20hrs of classes a week. If I'm going to do this, I want to do it full bore. I'm not a tourist, I want to spend as many hours in effective Chinese classses as I can, but I'm only available from June 1 to early September.

This is my last chance. Nibblet's birth in November is going to make this a lot harder to do in the future. But, I don't want to just go and run the risk of being stuck with unexpectedly larger bills.

Bailing for a bit

I'm going offline for a week. I've been behaving weirdly even by my own rather liberal standards and I need to wrap up my PhD application. I'm answering e-mail, but otherwise, I think I need to denetwork until I have a research plan.