That’s Mandarin teachers you to speak right away.

I did the intensive program which was 4 hrs day, from 10-12 in the mornings & 1 to 3 in the afternoons, 5 days a week. I signed up for 3 months and am currently having a break for the summer but have decided to sign up again at the end of August. The intensive course covers speaking, listening, reading & writing so you learn every part of the Chinese language, which includes learning the Chinese characters which is quite hard! I think That’s Mandarin has an interesting approach in teaching you to speak straightaway, I choose to study the video classes where they show you a video and you need to describe what you see, this way you learn a variety of things right away, this really worked for me. I heard at University people can study for over a year and still can’t speak Chinese because they learn a lot of reading and writing.

I started learning as an absolute beginner, since my studies I can see that I can understand a lot more, when people are talking to me in the beginning I was just lost but now I kind of know what they are talking about and sometimes I can recognize full sentences and phrases, I can see the progress I have made.