Drill of Mandarin Language National Exam Package 1

Ni hao! That means "Hello!" in Mandarin Chinese. Did you know that more people speak Mandarin Chinese than any other language in the world? That's right. Even more people speak Mandarin than English.
Mandarin Chinese is a beautiful language. It's one of the most sought-after languages to learn in the world. Why? Because it's hard to learn just by listening.
Unlike Spanish and French, which largely use the English alphabet as the source of their letters, Mandarin Chinese requires a whole new alphabet filled with thousands of pictographs, or picture-words. Even Asian people find this alphabet hard to learn!
So if you want to learn Mandarin Chinese, what do you do? Well, you've got a couple of options.

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1. Take a six-week class at a local community college. You might learn from a teacher who has never been to China or isn't a native Chinese speaker.
2. Pick up a book from your local Barnes and Noble or Borders. You might learn the picture alphabet, and you might learn how to spell a few of the transliterated words, but you certainly won't pick up the accent you need to pronounce your words correctly.
3. Rent some learning language CD's from your local library. They might be scratched up and dinged so they don't play in the player of your car, and they might be missing several pages from that handy-dandy study guide.
4. Visit China yourself and immerse yourself in the language for two months. That would be really cool, but very few people can afford this, especially in a bad economy.
Do any of these options sound like a good idea? Because none of these will successfully teach you Mandarin Chinese!
You'll only learn bits and pieces - but never the accent, the alphabet, AND the language!
That's why I bought a learn Mandarin Chinese program. It's so, so, SO much easier to learn from real, native Mandarin Chinese speakers who have a clue what they're talking about.
I tried taking a learning language class at a community college one time. Sure, it was fun, but I had to make a weekly commitment to drive there - at night, no less. It was far from convenient.
I can follow along in the study guide if I need to and take notes at my own pace.
Doesn't that sound like a much better option? You bet it does!

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Drill of Mandarin Language National Exam Package 2

Students are flocking from all over the world to learn the language that grants access to what increasingly seems as its going to be the greatest shift in global power of our time: the rise of China as an industrialized and extremely populous nation. China will even in the medium term attract a clout of interest from businesses and other countries alike. The simple fact that every Chinese person is getting richer at a really astounding rate and that they are 4 times as many as there are Americans, means that the global status quo dominated by the Washington consensus will need to change in due time. With it, the nature of the benefits of Mandarin proficiency will also change.

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Picking the right Mandarin language schools can be tricky; this is a short checklist of what you should be looking for and what you are better of avoiding. It may sound weird, but the thing you are looking for is not a Chinese language school. You are looking for a western language school in China. The Chinese way of teaching will not agree with your background. This is not that strange, Chinese culture is very different from Western culture in many ways. One of these ways is how power is divided in society. In China you are not in a position to question a superior, where as in a western institution feedback is very much appreciated. Sociology tends to classify post modernity, the time we live in now, as network based. Stepping into a Chinese classroom is therefore a bit of a shock for most westerners. We are used to not only being able to ask questions when we don't understand, but also question when we don't agree. Both actions are not appreciated in a Chinese classroom and if it does not lead to friction in terms of interpersonal relationships it does at least represent friction in terms of drag on the study pace. This is first and foremost juxtaposition of Chinese and Western educational principles.
The second one that western people are unable to fully cope with is the focus on memorization. Sometimes the level of memorization is simply ridiculous. I know of a school where they required students to assimilate a hundred new words every day. Needless to say, students were unable to do this and fell behind the class pace, which was really the teachers pace as the inability applied to the whole class. However, because it was a Chinese Chinese school, things did not change, as there was not scope for feedback and for all I know they are still trying to hammer in a hundred words per day.
A western student has no time for the hammer. Westerners want to learn by doing. When we learn math we do so by asking questions when we don't understand, and then we go home a practice it, we don't try to memorize math for the simple reason that it is really really inefficient to do so. The same applies to language studies, we want to understand why and then go away and practice it.
Of course it is not the case that every language school in China run by Chinese people has not caught on this trend. The case is however that those schools with mixed management do the very best. It is the combination of Chinese experience of teaching the language and Western experience of learning it that seems to be golden formula for success when it comes to connecting western students with a domestic education in the Mandarin language.

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