You will enjoy Your time in Chengdu, it’s a great place. The summer is hot, but in the winter it can become quite cool.

If You like to go out, there are many places to see and party. Try 美高美 and Babi-Er (don’t know the characters). Then if Your Lady is from Chengdu, she can probably show You everything. 6 weeks is probably to short for seeing the city in detail, but when You stay there for a whole semester You get Your chance. Everyone who visits Chengdu loves it. It’s a great place.

I want to study in winterterm 2009, so I’ll go there in january.
When I work hard, so every day 1.5 h, I can learn 10 characters per day what would be 70 per week - but of course I can’t remember them for very long, so I always gotta repeat them - so I learn 10 per day and reapeat another 20, that’s my 2h of daily work. Unfortunately I usually don’t keep doing that for very long, therefore I just remember something like 600 characters^^ but it’s already enough to read a lot of things.

I don’t wanna go to Beijing or Shanghai because I don’t know anyone there and my gf’s uncle is a physicsprofessor at jiaotong uni, so I can get in there cheap and easy - but first gotta get my Matura finished. (Abitur in Germany)

If You can learn 100 a week, that means You could read a newspaper after 20 weeks, and literature / scientific articles after 40 weeks. 40 weeks, that’s a little more than half a year. I want to see anyone become that fluent in Chinese in such a short time. Such intelligent people would probably go to one of the expensive high end universities of the country.

I feel most Koreans / Japanese have quite some money and will stick to the modern cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Although Chengdu is well developed compared to many other Chinese cities, outside China this is not a well known fact.

Chengdu is quite a nice city, more modern, better than for example Kunming where I stayed this spring. Yet it has so many parks and temples, places for relaxing and laid back. It is hard to compare it with fast paced cities like Hongkong. By the way, Hongkong is a bad place for learning Mandarin, most people here speak Cantonese or English on the street. Mandarin is rare here.

When do You want to go to Chengdu? How long do You want to stay there?
Don’t worry, every semester there are new international students, and the mix can change often.

How many characters did u learn then per week? 100?