Mandarin House

[Mandarin_House]

大家好!

My name is Aaron. I am yet another foreigner living in Shanghai, China and I currently work at Mandarin House. I expect some of the posters here may have heard of us before, but it turns out we haven’t properly introduced ourselves in this forum before – hence my post today!

Mandarin House is a Chinese language school established in 2004. We offer a range of courses that include group classes, private 1-on-1 lessons, business Chinese and HSK preparation options for all Chinese levels. We also host China’s best Chinese Summer Camps for children and teenagers.

Our schools are located in the hearts of Beijing and Shanghai (Central Place & People’s Square respectively) and are very modern, comfortable and great for learning. I have attached a couple of photos to this post so you can have a sneak peak.

Our teachers are all industry qualified in 'Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages’ (TCSOL) and our average teacher has approximately 3,000 hours of TCSOL experience making them some of the industry’s best. I truly believe we can provide students with a superior learning experience in terms of quality and efficiency.

We are fortunate to have a very good reputation in China and overseas. We are the nationwide Chinese training partner of numerous Fortune 500 companies and have been recognised by Language Travel Magazine as a former winner and multiple nominee for their “World Language Provider’ Star Award. We are also the only Chinese language school to be internationally accredited by the International Association of Language Centres (IALC). This means that we have reached (and maintain) international quality standards for our venues, operation, staff and teachers and self-developed curriculum.

If you want to learn more, our website is: www.mandarinhouse.cn and I invite you to visit our facebook site where you can see details and photos of our cultural activities held every week and subscribe to our bi-weekly ‘Chinese Corner’ piece.

“好好学习，天天向上！”

P.S. I have added some photos of our Shanghai school we took last week so you can have a sneak peek into the school.

[jiminchina]

ah, I just met a girl who studied there (Beijing Campus) yesterday. She said Mandarin House was quite a rip-off, with classes bigger than had been promised, an uninspiring teacher and very high prices for no apparent reason. She left after the first four weeks and went to check out some other schools, all of which charged half the price and seemed a lot better, where she is studying now.

Funny that they advertise on here now...

[abcdefg]

I attended your school in the spring of 2007, Beijing, 国贸 branch in the CBD. Started with a small group class and later studied one-to-one. My teacher was excellent and I was overall very well pleased. Mandarin House was my introduction to Chinese.

[driftman]

I took some trial classes at their Beijing school and I was not that impressed, particularly considering the prices they are charging. From the teachers and atmosphere I would say one of the lower ranking schools here, but they seem to get a lot of students via agents from abroad who presumably get commission, which explains the high prices. I dont know what kind of "industry" TCSOL qualification my teacher had, but if she really had been teaching for 3.000 hours then that proves that doing something for a long time doesnt necessarily make you good at it. She couldnt explain basic grammar!

[Aimandarin]

I am a Mandarin teacher, I know I shouldn’t come here to criticize other teacher work [especially when you only registered five minutes ago, and you appear to be some Brazilian guy. Odd. Admin], but after a few teaching with students who has studied at the Mandarin House, I have some doubts that I would like to get some answer. I have a few students who came to me after studied at Mandarin house. They have studied 1 to 6 months at your school. The problem is none of them like to study the Chinese characters, or know any characters even after months of study. Some consider pinyin as a Chinese written language and refuse to study the character. If the Mandarin house teachers are really good professional, I think they know how important the character is, even for the spoken language. Sometime I think that Mandarin House is killing the language. Now a day, any of my students who want to study in China, I always say please avoid Mandarin House.

[Mandarin_House]

同志们好! It’s me again.

We ask for feedback from each student that completes our courses, but it is great that we are getting some feedback on the school from some non-students as well.

Please allow me to help clear up some issues:

1. Our maximum class size is 10 students per class. This class size has not been exceeded before in either Beijing or Shanghai. Of course for some of our organised activities we consistently get over 10 students taking part at once (i.e. Chinese cooking, kung fu etc).

2. We are different to universities that teach Chinese as we found many of them teach with a focus on academic Chinese. As a result, we developed our own group class curriculum to put more of a focus on living Chinese - even in this case students have the option to learn characters on an intensive level or not (some students prefer to accelerate their spoken language). You may be surprised to find out that we have a number of Chinese university students studying at our schools despite the fact their university has its own Chinese classes - this is due mainly to our teaching approach and personable environment.

3. We are here to stay and we maintain consistent standards. For the fees you pay Mandarin House you know exactly what you will be getting - Chinese courses that reach and surpass internationally accredited standards as set by IALC. No other Chinese language school can make that claim. Approximately 30% of our new students are returning students which indicates to us we must be providing good value for money and giving our students what they want.

Thanks for your time,

P.S. *abcdefg* I'm glad that you are pleased with your time at our school in Beijing and considering that you are a regular here with over 1,000 posts it means a lot to hear your good feedback. 2007 was quite some time ago now - are you still in China or using Chinese in a regular environment?

P.P.S. *jiminchina* I would like to invite you to our school for a trial lesson so you can experience for yourself our school - PM me and let me know if you are interested.

P.P.P.S. *driftman* You too would be welcome for another trial.

[imron]

@aimandarin. In the interests of full disclosure, would you mind stating which school if any you work for?

[Aimandarin]

Admin, I have been reading this forum for about 2 years, i never left anything post at the forum, due to my bad English. I really have self conscious about how bad criticising other professional. I registered and left the message right after because I really want to know the answer. Perhaps I will do more participation in the future if you allow.

[abcdefg]

P.S. *abcdefg* I'm glad that you are pleased with your time at our school in Beijing and considering that you are a regular here with over 1,000 posts it means a lot to hear your good feedback. 2007 was quite some time ago now - are you still in China or using Chinese in a regular environment?

Still in China, namely Kunming, using Chinese every day. But you couldn't get me to return to Beijing on a bet.