Curriculum & Method

That’s Mandarin has over six years of experience teaching Mandarin Chinese to foreign students from all over the world. In this time we have gained a great deal of experience in understanding the specific challenges people face when they start to learn Chinese. We have developed our own materials, including text books that help you to understand and learn Chinese characters, and also our own methods. These methods have proven highly successful in ensuring our students are confident they can communicate, regardless of their language level. We encourage you to read our former student’s testimonials to understand the success of our methods over more traditional approaches.

Because our students (except for those who take online classes) learn Chinese in China, we prioritise learning how to communicate in real life circumstances. Rather than being fixed to a text-book, we believe our method has the flexibility required for you to begin to understand how the Chinese language really works. Once we have got to know you and your learning style better we can put together a set of materials tailored to you. At the beginner level, our teaching materials aim to give you a strong foundation from which you can develop your Chinese. As you move to intermediate and advanced levels the classes are more closely orientated to your individual language learning needs. If you have specific requirements (for example to study vocabulary specific to law, finance or Chinese culture) we can design classes for this too.

Before your classes begin we will invite you to the school for a language assessment class. If you are not currently in Beijing or Shanghai we can do this over Skype. We will ascertain your current level of proficiency, and then recommend which of our Chinese language programs is best suited to you.

If you’re hoping to progress quickly, why not try our intensive small group program, which includes 4 hours of small group classes (usually 3-4 students) per day, every day for 4 weeks. This program is aimed at beginner level students and a new program will begin at the start of each month (email us for more info about specific dates). In the small group classes, you will focus on how to survive in real life situations (e.g. taking a taxi, eating out), and everything you learn will be useful and relevant to your everyday lives. In addition to your classes, we will organize cultural activities and weekend outings, as well as organizing accommodation and some of the more practical aspects of your trip to China. See our small group intensive programs page for further details.

Another option is our intensive one-on-one program is typically 4 weeks long and includes either 4 or 6 hours of private classes each day, 5 days a week. As all your classes are individual, we can focus on your personal strengths and weaknesses, mould the course around your own interests and will have time to fully answer any questions you might have. If you cannot commit to a 4 week program, or want to study for longer, we can design a specialized Chinese language program to fit around your schedule. See our intensive one-on-one programs page for more details.

We have a variety of methods to make learning easy. During the class, you do not need to write down notes as we type up every new word you learn and print them out at the end of the lesson. We will also make a recording of the new words you learn each day, which you can listen to at home. This helps you to recall the words and remember the pronunciation. Our school encourages a Chinese-only policy for communication, as far as this is possible, because we believe this is the most effective way to ensure that you learn Chinese quickly and learn to use it confidently. We recognize that this is not always appropriate, but we hope that you will try to use your Chinese as much as you can – both in and out of the classroom.