I would get into the mindset that you cannot teach like you would in the West. Teaching in China has a fairly steep learning curve to it. Do not get dismayed if your teaching style doesn't work in China, the Chinese education system is, for lack of better description, completely messed up. If you start teaching and you don't seem to be getting through to them, it's normal. You cannot teach Chinese students like they are Western students, it will not work nine times out of ten. For the best students, it wont matter, but for the poorer students they'll just stare at you with a deer in the headlights face.
I'm not sure if you've taught before, but I would get it in your head that you're going to find Chinese students rather difficult to teach and deal with until you learn how to teach and manage them. In my opinion (I deal with high school students) they desire strict but fair teachers and respond very well to punishment rather than reward (i.e. Extra Credit will get you no where, but punishing students who don't do 'Extra Credit' will). Also, except for the best students, there is a lack of critical thinking skills. Open ended questions do not work. You cannot ask a Chinese student 'What do you think?' they will immediately freeze up and go 'Uh.... Uh.... Uh....' trying to find out what the correct thing to think is. Chinese students are told the answers to almost every problem they will encounter, so asking them to come up with the answer on their own is a scary thing for them. This is because in their educations system they are always punished for a wrong answer. So, they're afraid to say something wrong, even if the questions has no right or wrong answer! It's almost like they're programmed, which they are from their education, to be like little robots. You gotta push the right buttons to get them to do what you want. The better students are able to pretend to be like robots but are able to think outside the box as well. You'll love those students, but they're not the most common.
There are only two foreign teachers who I know that speak fluent Mandarin. I would say a sizable portion of us know enough to get around and order some food, but not fluent by any stretch of the imagination. Also, because Hefei is a 'small city [of nearly eight million]' not many people who you will meet on the street speak a lot of English. The Chinese here tend to be very friendly and helpful, but it's not like Shanghai.
As far as learning the language, you have three main options: self study, going to USTC or Anhui for Chinese classes, or hiring a private tutor. It depends on your learning style. USTC and Anhui are taught by Chinese teachers in the Chinese method which is memorize, memorize, memorize. A friend took a class but dropped out after she said she learned very little useful Chinese, it was just all memorizing vocabulary (which is how they learn English). I personally bought two books and have begun self studying (my preferred method).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080484299X/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415700108/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1My goal is to study for the HSK (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_Shuiping_Kaoshi) which is the Chinese language proficiency test. I'm figuring it'll take me three - five years to become relatively fluent. But, it really depends on how much Chinese you want to know. You can be fine living in Hefei with very basic Chinese, but if you want to interact with the local people (since the vast majority don't know any English) you're going to have to become conversational at the very least.
And like 大枪 about the probation period is to make sure you're getting paid full salary.
Oh, as for life in China, I'd check out these two websites to read some news about China....
http://www.chinasmack.com/http://www.tealeafnation.com/http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/One final piece of advice:
Get a VPN before you come here. I use
https://12vpn.com/ but I know lots of people who use
https://www.astrill.com/ as well. They're all about the same price.
