10-Week Beginner Online Chinese Course

Ever wanted to be able to bust out perfect Chinese when ordering at a Chinese restaurant, like I do on my popular YouTube channel Xiaomanyc? To amaze the nail salon ladies with your fluent Mandarin? To finally be able to talk to your Chinese relatives...in Chinese?!

When I first began learning Chinese over a decade ago, I felt SO CONFUSED by teaching material that was totally irrelevant for beginners. My teachers would try to explain minute details about the writing system that didn't make any sense, because I didn't have any idea how the language actually worked!

But unfortunately, because of the myth that "Chinese has no grammar", it too often gets taught directly from the written language in a way that overlooks how the language is actually used. This is made worse by the fact that native speakers sometimes try to teach Chinese how THEY learned Chinese in school -- characters first! -- which doesn't make any sense for us because when they were learning Chinese, they were *already* fluent in the language!

My course will not be like that. Whereas most Chinese courses bore you with endless drills and character memorization, we will be starting with sentences from Day 1, just like how a child would learn. Which is not only way more effective but also way more fun! It's exactly how I would have wanted to learn Chinese myself if I could start all over again, and it's exactly how I go about learning new languages these days. I will be providing a “textbook” of my design for us to work through, essentially a conversation-heavy, character-optional workbook with dialogues that contain the most relevant vocabulary you need to know, drawn from frequency lists and my personal experience. We will be working through that every week and I will be trying to make class as interactive for us as possible, so come prepared to talk with me in Chinese in class!

I will be compressing my 10+ years of experience learning and teaching Chinese into this 10-week, live Zoom course. I will be teaching conversational Mandarin Chinese, as spoken by over 1 billion people around the world, along with lots of fun cultural tidbits along the way and hopefully some guest speakers as well. We'll be doing one 90-minute course per week, along with virtual "office hours" with me scheduled at another point during the week where we can chat about how your learning is going and you can field me with any questions you have.

Each class will be strictly capped at 20 people for the best experience.

Looking forward to meeting you! 期待和大家见面！