My Story
In 2009, I came to the U.S. for the first time to pursue my master’s degree in education.
Confidently and ready to use my English that I had been studying for 15 years in China, I arrived at the Chicago airport, waiting for my connecting flight.
With much excitement after I saw a McDonald’s, I told the server what I wanted to order, but I was a little confused when she asked me “For here or to go?” I was like, “To go? To go where? I’m waiting for my plane to go to Atlanta.” You can imagine her face 😂.
Although I had studied English for years, I had no confidence when it came to listening and speaking. I felt frustrated and ashamed of my English during the first few years studying and working in U.S., not able to understand certain expressions from native speakers.
After many encounters like that McDonald’s experience in the following years, I wonder how come the English I heard here is sometimes different from the textbook English I had learned? How come I still find it challenging to communicate even though I had memorized tens of thousands of vocabularies?
I found the same thing with my students when I started teaching Mandarin with textbooks. I still cringe when I see “你好吗？(nĭhăoma)” taught as “How are you?” in any Chinese textbook, because people rarely use this phrase in China.
After a few years of teaching Mandarin at school settings, I decided to abandon the textbooks. Instead, I started to focus on teaching the most high-frequent vocabularies and expressions used in everyday life. With sufficient comprehensible input (listening and reading), students are able to express themselves in their own words naturally and unconsciously from day one.
Since then, I have helped many of my students to go from zero to conversational fluency in Mandarin. If you want to improve your listening and speaking in Mandarin, I can help you to reach your goal too.