GuavaTalk Blog

Sorry for the long delay in posting.  It’s a blogging faux pas, but things have been busy both professionally and personally!  Still, it’s no excuse.  Fortunately, I have a number of different updates.

1.  We are pleased to announce that on May 14th, 2008 at 9 pm Eastern we will be having a free online public class.  The folks at WizIQ, the free online classroom tool that we use, have been encouraging us to conduct a public class that students from all over the world can join.  I believe the platform can support hundreds of people joining, so we’re excited to see if we can bring students from all over the world into the classroom on May 14th to learn some basic Chinese.  We will have one of our best Chinese teachers, Hailing, deliver the session, where you’ll learn the phonetic system for Chinese (pinyin) and some basic Chinese phrases.  It should be a great way for everyone to get started with learning Chinese as well as to see how education is going to increasingly look like for the coming generation.  We are hoping it will be a highly interactive and effective session for everyone involved.  Be sure to sign up and bring your headset and microphone to participate!

2. We recently received the full endorsement of Martin Symonds, the co-author of Chinese Made Easier, for our service.  Martin has been a great friend of 1on1 Mandarin, our offline Chinese school over the years, and we use his textbook series for our Chinese Tutorial class.  We believe our use of Chinese Made Easier is unique and reflective of our emphasis on language being a tool for communication and not a set of knowledge to be memorized.  Chinese Made Easier is unique among all Chinese language textbooks because it is written for a western audience.  It emphasizes getting up and speaking as soon as possible and in the early lessons, is exceptionally practical, and does not force students in the early lessons to memorize characters.  Instead it allows the student to ease into characters by using more heavily “pinyin”, the Chinese phonetic system, which is a bit more understandable and manageable to a western learner.  Martin has been promoting our service to his connections worldwide, and we are highly appreciative of that.

3. Some new partnership highlights.  We recently have formed an informal partnership with an organization called Families with Children from China in New York.  They are a set of about 5800 families in the greater New York area who have or are waiting to adopt children from China.  We saw a real need for parents and children in their organization to learn Chinese and are pleased to offer them a special discounted package for Chinese learning.  I have witnessed in China the acute societal need for organizations like FCCNY and am excited that we will soon help many families in their organization learn Chinese!

Classes for our offline school, 1on1 Mandarin, and GuavaTalk are really starting to gear up now with students in Beijing returning from their New Year’s holiday, which is great, but our teachers are still finding time to create some more helpful survival Chinese videos. Check them out in the below links on youtube:

1. Learn how to thank you, your welcome, and variations on that. Probably most of you already know “xie xie”, but what about the standard responses or how to express that you are VERY appreciative? Check out the video to learn.

2 . In China, massages are very cheap! I’m not a big massage person, but it’s hard not to partake regularly when the massages are so affordable. In some places, you can get a very good foot massage or full body massage for less than $10. As a result, it’s helpful to know what to say when you get to the massage parlor to instruct your masseuse.

3. Saying good-bye after a long day at work or after a party is also helpful. It’s also great to know variations like, “See you later” or “See you in a bit!”

4. China, or Beijing at least, is about crowds, so it’s important to know how to say, “Excuse me” to part the seas of people.

5. Finally, learn how to say, “I’m sorry!”

I see a lot of Chinese videos out there that are simply getting people to repeat sounds without really explaining their meaning, context, grammar, or structure. Through our videos, you will not only learn how to imitate and say various phrases, but also, you’ll get a foundation in Chinese grammar through our detailed explanations of every word in each phrase.  For a systematic or visual learner, these videos are great.

We haven’t created a good demo video yet for Mandarin 2.0 in the online environment, but because spring orientation day is happening tomorrow for our offline school, 1on1 Mandarin, we put together a fun little video to show our new students how they can request any topic they want at any time during their classes to be taught using our Mandarin 2.0 methodology. Mandarin 2.0 creates a class that is highly focused on the student’s needs, highly communicative, and fun. In this video, a student learns how to order food at a restaurant in Chinese.

I used to be a management consultant, so I used to create Powerpoint slides every day, and I once thought the only tangible skill I had was creating slide presentations! That might not seem like a great skill to have, but I will argue that Powerpoint is a powerful tool for communication when used appropriately. I am realizing now as well that Powerpoint can be a great tool for teaching. Our teachers create Powerpoint presentations to teach all of their classes online, and email the presentations to students after every class for reference. The presentations help keep our classes organized in a logical fashion, provide visual stimuli for visual learners, and help our teachers communicate their teaching points in deeper ways that cannot be achieved with simple oral instruction. Online we have the benefit of using Powerpoint and the whiteboarding functionality in WizIQ as a powerful combination. Here’s an example of the Powerpoints that we use. This is from our Survival Chinese teaching series.

| View | Upload your own

Several of our online students are currently using Mandarin 2.0, which is our unique communicative methodology for teaching Mandarin conversation. We love it because we have created a methodology based on modern 2nd Language acquisition theory, which gives students a safe environment to advance rapidly in speaking and listening, in the areas and subjects that they choose themselves.

Now that we have trained all of our teachers in the methodology, we are pleased to also allow all of our students, whether they have chosen our Chinese Conversation class or not, to learn with Mandarin 2.0 “on-demand.” Whenever you want, you can use a form like the one below to submit to us what you want to learn, and your teacher will prepare two classes based on your request that will be highly communicative and beneficial to your oral speaking. Today we had a mother request to learn how to share some basic children’s stories in Chinese to her children. Based on her request, we chose a few stories, taught them to her, encouraged her to re-tell the story in her own words and ask questions about the story as if she were talking to her children. Along the way, our teacher supplemented her vocabulary in places that she needed and helped her tell the story in more precise words. The end result was a highly satisfied customer. Obviously, we love it when that happens!

Here’s a sample Mandarin 2.0 “on-demand” request form:

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Please describe the topic you would like to discuss or the Chinese-speaking situation that you’d like to prepare for.

Topic or Situation Description:

What are the major sub-topics that will be discussed or outcomes that you want to achieve?

What are some of the new words or phrases you would like to know (off the top of your head)?

Basic Guidelines for Student

1. Ask “How do you say?” whenever you want?

2. Your teacher will provide a basic structure for the class to keep it organized. Please do your best to follow it, since it will facilitate an efficient learning experience.

At least 5 people emailed me recently about this article in the New York Times about learning languages online.  Funny thing is that my twin brother, Mike, is a New York Times reporter, and that day had mentioned that he wanted to email a few editors about our company.  I guess we missed out on an incredible PR opportunity!  But I did want to comment a bit on some of the companies mentioned in the article like ChinesePod and Live Mocha and compare GuavaTalk with their services.

ChinesePod is great.  I am a subscriber and listen to their podcasts when I can to learn new vocabulary words, but I view ChinesePod as a complementary service and not a direct competitor to GuavaTalk.  It’s great as a supplement to your language learning, but if you are a serious Chinese language learner who is trying to advance quickly in language, it really cannot be a standalone substitute for GuavaTalk.  We offer an affordable way for you to quickly learn Mandarin.  With the guidance of a professionally trained teacher, you are going to get a superb foundation in Chinese pronunciation, which is exceptionally important since Mandarin is a tonal language, and grammar.  Your teacher will regularly be putting you in safe situations where you will essentially have to try to speak Chinese, and therefore let your brain’s natural language learning cognition functions start activating Chinese speech patterns in your brain.  Along the way, your teacher will be acting as a facilitator of communicative activities, monitor to correct errors in your speech, and instructor to supplement the areas where you are weak.  For systematic learners, you will get the benefit of using some of the most popular Chinese textbooks on the market, and for visual learners, you will have the benefit of visual aids that we create in powerpoint.  ChinesePod is something that a serious language learner uses on the side to build vocabulary and listening comprehension, but not something that a serious language learner would use to really get up the learning curve on pronunciation or speaking.  Consider using GuavaTalk and ChinesePod together and let us know what you think about the results!

LiveMocha is also very interesting.  I did sign up and chatted with some native Chinese speakers online via their IM client.  My language partner remarked that my Chinese was very good.  What I realized, however, from my experience is that while I could get some opportunities to practice speaking on LiveMocha, I really needed a professionally trained teacher at my level to really help me improve.  Why?  Well, first of all, the best language learning occurs when the teacher is teaching at an “n+1″ level.  This is a level that is slightly above your current level (or “n”).  When your teacher does this, you are not going to be bored nor are you going to be overwhelmed.  You are going to be pushed to try to articulate new things in a realm just beyond what you’re comfortable speaking in.  As a result, you will make mistakes, but you will have a monitor function with your teacher to make corrections.  As a result, you will advance in both fluency and accuracy of the language.  I really believe that unless you have a professionally trained teacher or a very good system to benefit from the language exchange, you will hit a wall in your learning, which is the point when you are pretty comfortable speaking with the vocabulary words you know and in the pronunciation you think is correct.  At that point, you need a forcing function to keep learning new words and grammar and to keep improving your pronunciation, which happens when your teacher is creating that “n+1″ environment, introducing to you new texts and dialogues at that level, and correcting your pronunciation with his/her professional training.  You need a system to learn, review, and reinforce those words.  So in short, use LiveMocha if you want some practice, but use GuavaTalk if you really want to accelerate up the learning curve in your language learning.

Obviously, I’m a bit biased, but I think a lot of people who have tried our service will agree with me!

You’ll definitely need this phrase when you’re bargaining in China.

When you see something you want to buy in China, you’ll need to know how to say, “I want to buy it!”

Bargaining is a way of life in China, but the first thing you need to know is how much is the item you want to buy!