Great Program – Fun and Effective

I had never studied any Chinese before and wanted to learn some basics before I traveled around China for a few months, so I signed up for a two week course with That's Mandarin in Shanghai. I'm certainly glad I did. I steadily progressed in my very basic Chinese every day. Their method really is to have the student jump right in, and after learning just a few words and grammar rules to go ahead and start practicing saying the kinds of sentences that are most used on a daily basis (often using role play interactions, such as pretending you are communicating with a waiter in a restaurant). The teachers would ask us to come up with unique, original simple sentences using the new words and grammar rules we learned each day. Then the teachers would write these sentences into their computer program and print them out at the end of the day so we could study them at night and review them again in class the next day. It was a great balance of keeping us on our toes to come up with sentences, but also feeling that is it was totally fine if we got something wrong, forgot a word, or took a while to complete a sentence.

The teachers were very friendly, knowledgeable in methods of beginner language instruction, and were an overall pleasure to work with. Each day we had one teacher for the first two hours and another for the second two. However those two teachers never changed - this worked quite well. We also had plenty of laughs in class and learned a little about each other. I only had one other student in my class (I believe all their classes are one-on-one or very small groups) and the small group setting made for an effective yet relaxed learning environment.

This course was the ideal way to begin my travels in China. For an introduction to beginner Chinese I definitely recommend That's Mandarin.