Silk Mandarin helps you put the pieces together

I started studying Chinese at Silk Mandarin after two of my friends with excellent Chinese highly recommended them. I had already lived in China for 2 years while working full-time and studying (in a half-assed way) on the side and had taken 1 year of university Chinese. But I felt really inspired at Silk Mandarin that my studying was going to pay off, which energized me a lot. One great part was that I was able to dictate what I wanted to learn and what would be useful for my work and daily life. That in and of itself was great, but it's not the thing that sets Silk Mandarin apart from other schools I've gone to. Instead the big things these guys do is teach you the logic of the language, using a very straightforward and easy to understand method, but one that I'd never heard anything about before in university or other private schools. Once my teacher started teaching me this, so many pieces were coming together for me in terms of sentence structure and how Chinese works. I think my language was really inconsistent before and I was never sure where to put which words because I knew different rules but not a unified one. So I'd say these guys are incredibly friendly and flexible and cool, but they also really know their stuff. I'm a native English-speaking editing/writing professional who majored in lit and my Chinese teacher knows the English parts of speech better than I do-- you have to understand language to teach it and these guys have it down :)