How to Learn Chinese Online With That’s Mandarin

Mandarin is the most spoken language in the whole word. With more than 1.1 billion speakers, or more than 11% of the world population speaking Mandarin, this is definitely a language worth learning! Thanks to the Internet, you can simply learn Chinese online from the comfort of your own home with That’s Mandarin.

I’ve always been interested in foreign languages and cultures. In middle school, I started learning French and soon after I got started with Spanish. A while later, I decided to take on a new language and was looking for a new challenge; that’s when I started studying Mandarin Chinese.

Fast forward a couple of years and after living and working in China and finally moving over to South Korea, I decided to take Chinese online lessons with That’s Mandarin to refresh my Chinese language skills.

What is That’s Mandarin?

That’s Mandarin is a Chinese as a second language institute and was founded in 2005. The company motto “让汉语学习变得简单快乐，弘扬中华文化” (“Make Chinese learning easy and enjoyable, promote Chinese culture”) has been successful and helped the company to grow to three campuses located in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in a decade. Since 2010, That’s Mandarin has also been offering online learning with their platform “Mandarin Café“. That’s Mandarin has become the first Chinese language school to combine advanced teaching methods both online and offline. They teach using their own method called “Chinese Link Words” (before – “Smart Lingo”), a technique that helps students remember new words better and faster than traditional learning methods.

Key dates:

• 2005 – First school was founded in Beijing
• 2011 – New campus in Shanghai opened
• 2018 – Shanghai campus moved to Jiaozhou rd
• 2018 – New branch opened in Shenzhen

Services Offered by That’s Mandarin

• Study Chinese in China
• Corporate Training (for companies such as Lufthansa, Audi, Siemens, Apple, BMW, Microsoft, and more)
• Learn Chinese Online
• Chinese Summer Camps
• China School Trip

Self-Study Portal

This is what the self-study portal looks like. It is divided into units that are available after you complete your level test. Every unit then includes different topics where you can practice listening, reading, speaking and also writing.

1-on-1 Live Class

The second part of your study adventure with That’s Mandarin are the live lessons. I have a wonderful teacher (shoutout to Ping Ping!) with whom I learn once a week for 1 hour. Depending on your needs, you can schedule as many lessons as you like.

At your arranged time, you simply enter the virtual classroom (accessible through your study portal) and start your class. You can see a virtual whiteboard with the lesson content and your teacher and you communicate via webcam located on the left of the virtual classroom.

What I really love about this set-up is the fact that I can see both 汉字 (Chinese characters) and Pinyin (the romanized writing system). I can also click on any word that I might not know and a translation shows up immediately. This makes it very easy to understand my teacher and comprehend the lesson content much quicker. I can also go ahead and save any vocabulary words to a vocabulary list for future reference.

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