A quick article on getting the most out of our services.

1.  Attend class weekly.

If you attend more than once a week without specific goals such as an extra class per month that focuses on writing characters, you run the risk of burning out.  If you attend class less than once a week, you will likely forget much of what you learned.  This could slow your progress to a crawl.

2.  Study daily.  Even if it's just for 15 minutes.

You will learn more from repeatedly studying the material for 15 minutes over the course of four days than in one 90 minute session the day before class.

Some quick steps to get the most out of our conversation classes:

1. Come prepared with your worksheet printed out.

This will allow you to review before the class starts and be able to pick up more as the class progresses.

2.  Study the material several times before the class starts.

Pronouncing Chinese words using pīn yīn.

Pīn yīn is the most commonly used romanization of Chinese characters today.  This simply means that it's Chinese written with Roman characters (abcd etc).

Pīn yīn has some drawbacks that you should be aware of.  Words can have the same sound but different characters and meanings.  For example, mā can be mean mother or it can indicate a question when used at the end of a sentence.  Also, it is easy to think of English sounds when reading words written out in pīn yīn.  It's important to really memorize each sound.

The worksheet for our August conversation class is finished!

As promised above, there's a lot of great material broken down into vocabulary, patterns, a conversation and useful phrases.

Click through to download the file.