2-week Immersion Program

CLI is fantastic and highly recommended! We loved our 2 week immersion program and only wish we could have stayed longer. Living in Beijing for nearly 2 years, my husband and I have taken Chinese lessons here and there, but our busy work schedules prevent us from spending enough time on it and really focusing. Our teen takes Chinese at school but finds it more academic, less conversational, and didn't feel confident speaking or navigating daily interactions. In China for the summer, we wanted to find a cool language program that would work for us as a family, all at different levels and with different learning styles. At CLI we each had our own 1-on-1 intensive classes during the day (the system of 3 teachers to 1 student is great) but met up in the kitchen at lunchtime for delicious communal meals with other students, and went out exploring Guilin or signed up for CLI activities in the afternoons. The husband liked the hikes, the teen loved the Mahjong lessons and volleyball excursion, and I was a fan of the CLI game room with ping pong table and well-stocked board game collection. The extensive library was great too. All of our teachers were excellent, patient and kind, the CLI team was super flexible with class scheduling, and you could choose the intensity of homework - relatively low in our case, to be honest, it was summer vacation after all! In general we could not have asked for a better experience (even the teen admitted she liked it, which is saying a lot). We stayed at a hotel in town for the first week, went on a weekend trip to a resort south of Guilin over the weekend, and then moved to the CLI dorm for the second week of class, which was comfortable and had everything we needed. We want to come back next summer!