The ‘Link Word’ Method

‘Link Words’ is one of the unique teaching methods we use to help our beginner students study Chinese effectively. It aims to help students master pronunciation and to increase their vocabulary quickly.

As Chinese words are often constructions of two characters, once you know a character you are likely to see it pop up in lots of other (related) situations. A great example is the word Tai Yang – tai 太 means too as in ‘too much’ it also can mean big or large. Yang 阳 means sun – and so together 太阳 means ‘the sun’ we think you’d agree the sun is pretty big. Later you will learn the word for balcony – Yang Tai – 阳台。 Now you can see the Yang is exactly the same – makes sense as the balcony often gets the sun. But the tai is different – why? Well this tai means stage or platform – you will see it pop up again when you learn the words for subway platform. So the balcony literally translated is the sun station – not so difficult to remember (indeed a lot easier to remember than ‘balcony’ which has no obvious logic to it). By using this method you are not learning a random set of unrelated sounds, but rather progressively building up your vocabulary, picking up new words all the time. We’re sure that this method will help to show you how logical and simple Chinese can really be.

As we have grown accustomed to the sounds that seem to cause the biggest headaches for students, we also know the English words which correlate with Mandarin pronunciation. For example the first syllable of ‘Charlie’ links with drinking ‘cha’ (Chinese for tea). We also provide a set of notes after each class with all the words you learned in the class – we review these and re-use these in future classes to ensure that as you learn Chinese in Beijing or Shanghai, you also retain what you’ve learned and feel confident to use it in everyday life!