Sinoland Chinese School in Wudaokou

[Chinese Learner]

Hi,

I've been attending Sinoland in Wudaokou for the last month and I thought would post here because I think they are very good and worth checking out. I would highly recommend them if you are interested in learning correct spoken Chinese.

Each class has only 4 students and essentially their system is based on much (much!!!!!)repetition of phrases based upon chapters from various different textbooks (e.g. Conversation 301, the Short-term Spoken Chinese series amongst others).

I spoke with owner of the school once and basically he told me that when he decided to start the school he didn't really know what was the best teaching method to use. So what he did was hire some respected language professors from Harvard and Princeton to do some consulting. They ended up constructing a curriculum where essentially for 3 hours every day you learn a list of vocabulary from a hand-out (in my classe we do on chapter every two days, every fifth day we revise the pervious 4 days phrases) and then repeat simple phrases after the teacher over and over again using the vocab form the lists. Afterwards you ask and answer you classmates similar phrases using the same word(s). The teachers are fairly strict with pronounciation and tones.

The classes are fairly cheap as they come to about 99 Yuan a day for 3 hours lessons a day and the school guarantees there will never be more than four students per class. You basically pay for 2 month blocks which come to about 4,600 Yuan I think, i f I remember rightly. They have about 5 levels.

On thing to keep in mind is that if you wish to learn to read and write, you need to do this on your own or take some extra one-to-one classes which come to about 80-90 Yuan an hour.

I studied in a university for 4 months before so that gave me a very good basis in reading and writing (though my spoken Chinese did not improve that much I feel because there were to many students per class) but I do find that in class I tend to make my notes in Pinyin to save time (though the hand-outs we get every two days are now 98% Hanzi because I am now a 'pre-intermediate')

I wish I had found this school ages ago because I truely think they are one of teh more efficient schools whe you want to learn spoken Mandarin.

I do not work for the school in anyway, shape or form - I promise - I just feel they are worth recommending! Try a trial class, I think you will be happily surprised.

http://www.sinolandchinese.com/

[sebhk]

So according to the website, all their "teachers have been trained by well-known scholars and professors from the Chinese faculties of Princeton and Harvard Universities". Right...

Of course it does not mention who those scholars are.

The teaching method is supposed to be based on Zhao Yuanren's work. I doubt very much that the owner of the school hired Zhao Yuanren to do some consulting, because he passed away in 1982. But the school apparently only started operating in 2007/2008.

To me all this sounds like the typical BS you get from commercial language schools in China. The teachers there might be good and I don't doubt you had a great time and improved your Chinese a lot. But actually the teaching approach you describe seems a bit outdated. Modern language education focuses more on patterns and not so much vocabulary/phrase memorization and repetition.

[Chinese Learner]

Maybe you're right, maybe not, I can't verify...

I'm just providing info...

I'm not an academic so I have no idea what new teaching methods exist at the moment etc. blah, blah, blah, I'm just relaying what I was told,and I have to say that I find the owner to be a very respectable and trustworthy man, so I believe him.

I just want to provide forum members with another option if they are trying to look at different options. To be frank, I truely don't care a stuff if other people enroll or not, I made good decision for myself.

All I can say is that, regardless of whether the classes are cutting edge or not, they do seem to force you to talk much more than on alot of the usual university (and private courses) which I would assume have even more outdated teaching methods. And my teacher cares alot about pronounciation and tones, which is much more than my previous university one.

And it seems cheaper than alot of the university courses out there as as well.

Two things..

Each student gets a questionnaire to fill in to see what he/she feels about the quality of lessons. Ok, not ground breaking but...

The headmaster (not the owner) sat in on our class for an hour once and made notes about the teacher's performance etc. and within a day altered a small aspect of our teacher's teaching style and also later advised us students about something he felt we could improve. As far as I am concerned that's very professional and serious. The headmaster sits in once on every single two month class to see how things are going. Maybe their method is not completely up-to-the-minute etc. etc., I have no idea, but as far as I am concerned these are serious, professional people, definitely not cowboys.

Anyway 'Horses for courses' and all that.

One question I have for you in that case is:

- Do you know of any private or public language schools in Beijing or the rest of China that teach using this modern 'patterns' method? I'd like to check one out.

Edited November 4, 2008 at 11:00 AM by Chinese Learner

[roddy]

For what it's worth, I ran into a guy currently doing one to one lessons at Sinoland the other day, he spoke very highly of it.