Chinese - Speak it like a native

or ask a native to speak it?

It only takes a few minutes for first time visitors to China to realise that most of their pre-conceptions about China were wrong, that "surprisingly" everything is in Chinese and that the vast majority of people do not speak English.

A short while later they get an even bigger surprise when they discover that the way the Chinese display numbers with their fingers is different too! Most find that the numbers one – five are understandable but six to ten are completely incomprehensible. All numbers are expressed using only one hand. Six, for example, is expressed by displaying the thumb and little finger. (Pictures kindly supplied by Frontiers Chinese Language School).












It is normally at this stage that they thank their lucky stars that have hired an interpreter (from China Expert naturally !) and that they decide to learn Chinese from one of the many language schools and private tutors.

Be warned, however - It is not easy to learn Chinese and, frankly, impossible to learn without expert tuition. Fortunately, there are a large number of Chinese language schools and private tutors available.

Language schools and private tutors

Please feel free to follow the links to various Chinese Language Schools. They are listed in alphabetical order. Most of them offer a choice of private lessons or group classes and are very flexible regarding the times of the lessons.

Some very basic info about Chinese

There is no such language as oral Chinese. Chinese is a collective word for a number of languages spoken by the Chinese people. Sometimes the differences are small (similar to the difference between English and American), sometimes the differences are wider (similar to the difference between English and Spanish) and sometimes the difference is huge (similar to the difference between English and Arabic or Hebrew). All of them though are tonal languages. That is to say that if you use the wrong tone you might get a completely different meaning!!! The times though are changing and today Mandarin Chinese is taught in all the schools and is used as the language for the National (not necessarily Regional) Radio and Television stations. (N.B. Mandarin Chinese has 4 tones plus a neutral tone). Despite the fact that there can be such big differences between the spoken Chinese languages all mainland Chinese use the same form of writing (Simplified Chinese). Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still use the traditional form.

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet but on characters that were originally pictograms. In some instances one character (called Hanzi) represents a word and sometimes more than one character is required. The Chinese characters can be transliterated via the use of Pinyin. Pinyin is the method used to express the characters with European letters and shows the correct tone for the pronunciation. The best way to explain this is to use a very simple example.

The Mandarin for ” Hello” would be expressed in Pinyin as “ni (3) hao (3)”. “Ni (3)” as in the English word “knee” and “hao (3)” as in the English word “how”. The numbers in the brackets represent the required tone. Pinyin was not invented in order to make life simple for foreigners, but as a tool for the Chinese to use, originally, typewriters and now computers.

Links to Chinese Language Schools in Beijing:

Beijing Mandarin School





The Bridge School, a Chinese language training school for foreigners.




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