TLI Wangfujing (Beijing) - My Review

[myann23]

TLI Beijing Wangfujing Center – My Review

I promised to review TLI Wangfujing a few times in this forum but I’ve put it off because of a combination of studying Mandarin like a madman now and my laziness for writing the review. Better late than never…

I studied at TLI Wangfujing for approximately two months this summer from June to end of July. My Mandarin before that was a combination of using Pimsleur and Assimil and it gave me some VERY basic stock phrases to use when arriving in Beijing, but for all intensive purposes by Mandarin was very low when I got here. Since arriving in China I have experienced three schools – TLI, a group class in Chaoyang with about 13 students, and now in Dalian, Dalian University of Technology’s Chinese classes, which I’ve since stopped going to, and TLI Dalian.

My schedule at TLI was 3 hours a day Monday through Friday. THIS WAS INTENSE!

Initially I arranged it so that I would start my lessons at 9:00 am and end at 12:00 pm but I was too fatigued from this. It really depends on what kind of student you are and what you’re looking for, but for me it was hard for me to keep up in classes because at the same time, I had several other distractions which prevented me from really focusing on my studies to the fullest. On a good day I would study 2-3 hours outside of class and on a bad day I would study only 1 hour. If you want to reap the fullest benefits, come to class prepared. After my first month I switched my schedule so my classes started at 10:00 am and I had an hour break at lunch so I would finish at 2:00 pm. This was a lot better.

At TLI, we started off with a quick review of pinyin which I finished in a couple hours. If you go to TLI as a beginner, I do recommend that you know pinyin well before you come because it’s hard to justify paying 110 RMB an hour for them to teach you pinyin unless price is no factor or your company is footing the bill. You can probably study by yourself or pay a student 30 kuai an hour to teach you that stuff. I didn’t do their full pinyin course, but it was pretty extensive and I’m sure your pronunciation will be decent by the end.

The books they use are published in house under their publication arm. The beginners books are Practical Chinese I and II. They are a strong point of the school, as the books are well-structured and give good English explanations of grammar points. These books, while using characters, focus more on pinyin, with characters written under the pinyin. I didn’t read any of the characters when I used them which I think helped my speaking and listening develop faster. My only complaint with the books is that there are more typos than I would generally like, but overall this doesn’t detract from the overall quality of them.

You can buy CDs with the textbooks and I really recommend them, especially for the dialogues and shadowing them. My complaint here is that while they had the audio for the vocabulary and main dialogue of each lesson, they didn’t have audio available for the drills which would have been a big help in hammering in sentence structures in your head.

My teachers were generally good and well-prepared. Each hour I had a different teacher. They were generally good with grammar explanations. They have a certain methodology that isn’t ground breaking, but solid in that students are given as much opportunity in class to speak, make mistakes, and learn from them. At the end of each lesson, you have a mini-test and a listening exercise (those of which I was initially horrible at).

A good thing is that the teachers and the school are very flexible with you. You can pick what books you want to learn from (although I recommend TLI owns for beginner and intermediate) and how you want to structure your lessons. I did not initially focus on character learning at the start, which I do not regret, but it has now put me in a weird situation where I need to learn a lot of characters before really moving up into the int-int level since a lot of printed stuff is character only.

If you go during lunch hour, several times a week you will have the opportunity to go out to eat with the teachers and staff which was pretty fun. You can practice your Chinese at the same time. There are a lot of cheap eats around the school, so it’s well worth it if you want to maximize your time at the school.

Overall this school gets a thumbs up from me. Right now I’m in Dalian taking TLI lessons from the Dalian center and they are more or less the same. I did try a few classes at Dalian University of Technology (without paying in advance) and found that hand’s down, 1 on 1 instruction is so much better than university classes for improving your Chinese. Whether it’s at TLI or any other school, there’s no comparison. The main thing is having opportunity to speak in class, and having targeted instruction based problem areas a student may have. The downside to one-on-one class is there isn’t the social setting being in a university allows. At TLI I did make good friends with other students, but it’s not the same as being in the same class with them. Socially, it sucks but it will probably help your Chinese in the long run because you’ll do less socializing with people who speak your mother tongue.

Here’s my advice for people thinking about TLI and how to maximize the money spent –

1.) I think 12 hours of instruction a week is plenty. I would do three hours per day Monday/Tuesday, rest/review Wednesday, and three hours per day Thurs/Fri. There were quite a few students doing four hours a day Monday through Friday but I’m a little different in that I need my brain to work and assimilate the language in my head. A student told me there was someone who did 6 -7 hours a day of one-on-one per day before I arrived. It makes me tired to even think about that!

2.) I averaged 1 lesson/chapter from the TLI books more or less per day. Each lesson vocabulary ranged from 30-60 words I think. Sometimes so much vocabulary is thrown at you that it makes learning grammar less effective because you’re always wondering what these words mean that the grammar gets lost. I would ask them if you could purchase the books 1-2 weeks in advanced, learn 20-30 words a day and Supermemo the vocab. It will make learning the grammar a lot better and the listening exercises will be more pleasant to do.

3.) Bring a tape recorder. You never know what useful sentences you can wind up recording. I’m very big on comprehensible input, shadowing, and that sorta stuff. Recording the listening exercises at the end of the chapter and listening to it in your spare time will only improve your Chinese.

4.) Buy the CDs that accompany the texts.

5.) Use Supermemo or any of the other SRS programs out there. Just do it.

6.) This is just my opinion, but I feel like I made the right decision in doing pinyin first instead of characters. This eases your transition to the language at the beginning.

That’s all.

Mike

[wushijiao]

Very good write up. I'm sure that will be helpfull to a lot of people!

[roddy]

Yep, thanks for that.

You mention that the in-house textbooks are good. Do you know if they are available anywhere? Could you walk up to reception at a TLI school and buy them?

[myann23]

Sorry for the late reply, didn't see there was a "new" response to my thread.

No, I don't think you can buy the TLI texts outside of the school, but you can ask if you can buy from the school without taking the classes I guess. Maybe book a week at TLI and see if you can buy their texts at the end if you really want them. Might not be of much use to the people already in the intermediate, but for beginners they are solid.

Mike

[bearbrick]

thank for your invaluable review

which really dealt with the issues at hand precisely and practially - thank you - unlike some of the reviews which pay more attention to social and personal matters.

i would appreciate some feed back on the matter below

i had read in the beijing tli website that they have courses on " bible stories " ? and christian vocabulary ?..please see the bjtli.com site .......now ...does this mean that the TLI centre has a particular christian slant in their enviroment ?.......eg are the students mostly evangelical christians fro the USA or elsewhere ? .....

i hope this would not be the case .

secondly

was there a reason you chose Dalian tli ....and are you able to continue from where you left off at the bejiing tli ? ..... whats the dalian centre like ?

thirdly

is there a difference betwn the two beijing centres ? .,..which do you suggest ?

lastly

what are the teachers lilke at bothe beijing and dalian ?

thank you in advance

[myann23]

Yes, I did see that. The school doesn't have a Christian or evangelical slant from what I know of when I was there. I wouldn't be surprised if the founder was a Christian or something, but there's nothing that would suggest they brainwash you into believing something.

I choose Dalian TLI because I wanted to get away from Beijing. I need to learn Chinese for my job, so I couldn't get caught up with distractions that could arise in a city like Beijing - clubs, bars, traffic, people calling you all the time, etc. Dalian is much cleaner, the Mandarin is standard for the most part, still a modern city, cleaner, much better traffic....

The teachers in Dalian and Beijing were very good. The one thing the Beijing teachers had was that their English was better, so in certain cases that would help you if you quickly needed the translation of a word.

[bearbrick]

thanks v v much myann for the inputs

just two more matters

whats the difference betwn the TLI IYU beijing and the wangfujing centre ? ,in terms of well..everything ! ;) ..in partic the student make up and the enviroment .i am what you would consider a mature student . ))

the other matter is ...would you know anything about the SH and Suzhou , GZ TLIs ?

thanks again

wishing you a fab 2008

[foodtarget]

I have another question about TLI. I was looking at their main webpage and they mentioned that they offer classes in Taiwanese (also known as Minnan). I'm sure this is true for the centers in Taiwan, but do TLI outposts in the mainland offer Taiwanese instruction? I'm a linguistics student planning a research thesis involving the Minnan dialect, so I would like to learn at least some basic Minnanhua.

[myann23]

No, I don't think they do as all the teachers are from the mainland. I guess to make sure you can just give their school a call.

[jiaoshou]

I was referred to the new TLI Dalian and went to research it.

I also found a TLI school in Dalian, Tianjin, Suzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taiwan. Although I read somewhere they have 18 schools.

Does anyone have any comments on any TLI school besides the Wangfujing and Dalian?

[Xander]

My review after 10 month at TLI Dalian

I can only give you some more information about TLI Dalian. Here it goes:

I have been to BLCU for one semester and to Harbin (private tutors) for one semester before, and wasn’t too happy with either of them, so I decided to try TLI.

I had forgotten a lot of the Chinese I had learned previously (had to go back to my homecountry in between) , but could still read I bit and communicate in Chinese. When I came to TLI I started with the BLCU 口语提高篇, and some 听力 book from the Peking University.

I have three classes a day, six days a week. From 9.00 till 11.00 and then from 15.00 till 16.00. The two first hours are 口语， where we go trough the lessons in the book, explain vocabulary, read and talk about the topics. The class from 15.00 till 16.00 is 听力. Because my accent is pretty bad I asked the teacher to be really strict and correct my pronunciation when reading aloud to them. For the 听力 classes we are doing the normal listening and answering the questions the first hour, but for the 听力 class the second hour on the next day I read the text (which I heard the day before) aloud to the teacher and she corrects my pronunciation. So every second day I have one hour of pronunciation class, instead of the 听力。

I think three hours is a good amount of classes every day, even though I sometimes feel sorry for not being as well prepared as I should have been, because preparing for three hours of classes every day, learning the vocabulary, reading the text etc. takes some time. Depending on the classes you are having one can probably do more or less than three hours every day. For me learning the vocabulary takes a lot of time, and money is a consideration as well, so three hours is pretty good.

I have not used any of the TLI books, so I can’t really comment on them. But I am happy with my 听力 books and the 报刊阅读 book, which I will start on in a couple of weeks. All of these books where recommended by the teachers.

I have three different teachers here at TLI Dalian, and they are all good. I think it is really up to you to get as much out of the teachers or any private tutor as you want. The biggest difference between a proper teacher and a private tutor, even if it is a fourth year student who’s major is teaching Chinese or a retired teacher, is their attitude, experience and the learning environment. Don’t get me wrong there are great tutors, but if you go the class, sit down in a classroom and it’s not you who is paying the teacher directly it’s different. At least that’s my experience. What I like the most about “one on one” is the fact that you can ask any question you want, and that you can ask the teachers to be really strict on the pronunciation and putting emphasis on the way you have to read a text. Even though I know the tones of most of the words I am reading aloud to the teacher, I still/often pronounce it in the wrong way, especially when you have to combine the tones, or need to know which tones are pronounced half, soft etc. And you need to have a proper teacher you can explain the tones, and how to read them properly.

I basically choose TLI Dalian, because I wanted to go TLI, but couldn’t afford the hourly fees or living cost in Beijing, Shanghai etc. I am know paying 88 RMB an hour for classes, 1800 for my 36 m2 apartment including internet and getting around with about 1500 RMB a month for eating, going out etc. I go the nearby Nationalities University to eat (very cheap), and sometimes the teachers come along. TLI helped my with finding the apartment.

TLI Dalian is located in the Development Zone, and it takes you 30 min with the light railway from the DZ to get to the city center. There is one other student at TLI who speaks English, and he says that there are quite a lot/some foreigners here in the DZ, which I think is important because as a beginner (back in Beijing and Harbin) I needed to speak some English once in a while. Another thing that is nice about TLI Dalian, from the perspective of a language student is the fact that TLI Dalian is by far the smallest one with few customers, and that allows teachers to stretch the classes five minutes if needed because there is no other student waiting, or chatting with the students while they are there. There is basically always somebody to talk to before or after the classes. The best thing for me is however that I have my own classroom, that is currently not put to use, where I can sit from 7 in the morning till 9 in the evening and learn Chinese, if I would be as hardworking as the Japanese. There is one Japanese guy here as well, 26 years old and company paying, and it’s motivating and frustrating to see how fast these guys can learn Chinese if they study 14 hours a day, and are smart. If you need to take the HSK, the teachers here have experience with helping to get Japanese guys to 7’s – 11’s within one year.

There is not that much happening in the weekends here (I haven't really tried to go out a lot in the DZ either, but there quite a lot a normal bars and "massage" places up here), so I go to the city once in a while to cook, drink and dance with some friends. All of my three friends are from Dalian, but I think they're Chinese is pretty standard, not very difficult to understand.

All in all: I would come to TLI Dalian again, even if I had the money to go to Beijing, because TLI Dalian is smaller/nicer, and I think the people up here are friendlier that in Shanghai and Beijing.

Any questions; put them here and I will try to answer them.

[myann23]

I echo Xander's sentiments about TLI Dalian. I first went to TLI Wangfujing and then went to Dalian where TLI teachers where the teachers traveled to my place to teach me 9 hours a week.

Although I did not attend courses inside the TLI classrooms at their office, I would think that would be the perfect type of situation for someone who wants to go hard-core, balls to the wall, with their Chinese studying. Xander makes a good point about them not having too many students. When you're not in class, because there should probably be a few empty classrooms, you can just sit inside one with your tapes/reading material/computer and study all day. If your teacher is available and not busy, you can ask her questions if you're unclear about a word or sentence. When you get sick of studying, you can chat some Chinese with them. You can also go to lunch with them. They are really nice people and have helped me with a lot of things aside from studying Chinese.

There are also lots of living options in the vicinity. One of my big gripes about my Beijing experience was that I was living in Fulicheng (in Chaoyang) and to get to TLI Wangfujing I had to take 45 minutes to get to school by a combination of walking and taking public transportation in the morning. Although I guess it wasn't THAT bad, I think if i only had to walk only 15-20 minutes to class everyday that would have made my experience much better and I would have had more energy in class. At Dalian TLI, you can probably find an apartment very close to the school, there's a very nice gym across the street (although I'm guessing a bit on the pricey side), a Starbucks a few blocks away to get your caffeine fix, and numerous cheap eats. Although everyone has different needs, that's pretty much all I need for my Chinese bootcamp. Whenever your head is about to explode from all the studying, you can take take some downtime and head to Dalian on the train, or go to the beach.

All in all, the biggest difference between my experience in Beijing and Dalian was that in Dalian, I felt I could actually RELAX. No more taking the Beijing subway, no more Beijing summertime heat, a lot less air pollution, less traffic congestion, beautiful beaches.

I lived near Dalian University of Technology when I was in Dalian. I definitely wish I had decided to live in the Development Zone. When I get back to China in June, my boss might require me to start work right away, but if I have the opportunity, I am planning to go back to Dalian's TLI for another go-round.

One more thing - I kept in touch with teachers from TLI Wangfujing and it seems a lot of the good teachers and a few administrators have left. There were some office politics/egos involved, a few people got unjustly fired, and then several teachers left the school in protest. I'm not sure if the new regime in charge of the office is good or not, but I wholeheartedly think the previous one was good, so it's a shame they are not there anymore. The current students who were studying at the school when everyone was fired left the school in protest as well. A previous administrator contacted me and I'm helping them get the word out - they are starting a new school and if anybody is in Beijing and wants Chinese lessons from good TLI-trained teachers at prices cheaper than TLI, give me a PM and I'll see if I can set you up.

[SkyFitsHeaven]

I took classes here for a year and I can't really say anything too great about it. There's nothing special about the methodology. Let's face it: it all depends on the teacher. I had one guy who was really motivated and wanted to teach. He got me excited. Then I had a guy who was only doing it for the paycheck. My learning really stumbled under him.

Frankly, I found the TLI textbooks to be TERRIBLE. Especially book one. I would highly recommend bringing your own materials here.

I did find the staff easy to work with.

[evasiege]

Anyone tried the programs in Suzhou or Taipei?

[koreth]

What's the neighborhood around TLI Dalian like? If you live near the school will you be surrounded by foreigners and/or professional business people? I liked the laid-back atmosphere of the neighborhood around Liaoning Normal University (Liao Shi Da) when I studied there -- a couple minutes' walk from my dorm and I could hang out in a mom-and-pop restaurant and practice chatting with the owners. I never made it up to the Development Zone but somehow I have this (totally unfounded) image of it as a more business-oriented place without as much of the "ordinary people just living their lives" feel. Am I totally wrong?

I want to go back to Dalian this summer and am thinking about TLI and a couple other places. TLI sounds great from an instruction point of view but I don't want a long commute to the classes so the quality of life around the school is a big question mark for me.

[paijing]

I dug up an old post that mentioned that sometime in 2006 a number of the teachers at TLI Wangfujing left the school. Does anyone know where they are now or if they're still teaching (or tutoring) in Beijing?

I'd love to PM myann23 and ask him, but I'm a new member, so I don't seem to have that privilege yet...

Any ideas?

[roddy]

Merging. You should be able to pm him now, but please ask for a response on the board so others benefit.