Free Public Chinese Class on May 14th!
May 1st, 2008 | Published in company
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!