Learning Chinese over Skype
Jul 6th, 2007 by LKS
For the last few weeks, I have been reviewing a new service called echineselearning.com. This site offers Chinese lessons in a monthly subscription format–for $100.00, you can participate in daily hour-long classes. Lessons are given one-on-one with a native Chinese teacher via Skype. For those Chinese students that aren’t in China, it’s a great way to learn or maintain Chinese.
The website is well run, with an extremely helpful and courteous staff that will aid you in navigating the site and, if you wish, arranging a trial lesson. The trial lesson is conducted by Ms. Zou Hongqiong, a very capable teacher with obvious experience teaching Chinese as a second language.
Materials are generally e-mailed to you before the lesson, and it is your responsibility to prepare. Ms. Hong ran through some drills, testing my comprehension of the material and probing whether I could flexibly use vocabulary and grammar that was part of the lesson. She was extremely adept at getting me to test my limits, strict with correcting errors, and overall was excellent.
Since then, my experience with echineselearning.com has been mixed. I’ve rotated through several teachers (of my own volition–I wanted to see what kind of teachers they had), and none of them come very close to the level of ability that Ms. Hong demonstrated. The types of materials seem limited, although in fairness I never completely clarified my study goals. On the plus sides, all the teachers are lively and make great efforts to please their students. For beginning and intermediate students of the language, there probably isn’t a better way to learn–besides going to China.
