Courses Available
Private Mandarin Chinese lessons are available for complete beginners on up. Our tutors will tailor your lessons to meet your language goals, including an appropriate balance of spoken and written Chinese (two very different animals!) and cultural tips. Private lessons generally meet in two-hour blocks and can be scheduled at the time and location of your choice.
Custom Chinese group classes are also available by request.
For more information about Mandarin Chinese lessons, contact Michelle – Michelle@WetzelServices.com.
Testing and Certification
Our instructors can help you prepare for the HSK (the national standardized test of proficiency for non-native speakers of Chinese, created by the Beijing Language Institute) or for the ACTFL OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview).
Our Teachers
Our native-speaker Mandarin Chinese tutors have taught students ranging from young children to university students to business professionals. They are enthusiastic about Chinese language and culture, and they swear Chinese is not as hard as people think it is – in fact, one of our teachers assures her students that English-speakers have a special knack for picking up Chinese pronunciation.
Our tutors speak fluent English, hold undergrad degrees in language study and graduate degrees in Foreign language study and Applied Linguistics, Education, English Education, and Library Science. One is working on her doctorate in Education Curriculum.
“I enjoyed trying to learn Chinese. The instructor made the experience very enjoyable.”–Mike
Chinese Fast Facts
- More than one billion people speak Chinese. (But not all Chinese is the same; there are several dialects. Mandarin is the most widely spoken by far.)
- Chinese is written with characters, not letters. Some characters were originally pictures of people, animals, and other objects; most characters today are a combination of semantic content (meaning) and phonetic content (pronunciation). You would have to learn about 3,000 characters to read most (non-technical) Chinese books, magazines, signs, and documents. (The most comprehensive Chinese dictionaries list 40,000 – 56,000 characters!)
- Chinese is a tonal language; this means that a change in pitch indicates a change in meaning – the meaning of the word, or grammatical meaning. (By contrast, English uses a change in pitch to emphasize a word or express emotion, e.g., but not to change the actual meaning of a word.)
The most commonly-cited example of this is the tonal variations for the syllable ma in Mandarin Chinese. It can have 5 separate meanings depending on the tone:
妈／媽(mā) “mother”—high level
麻 (má) “linen” or “numb”—high rising
马／馬(mǎ) “horse”—low falling-rising
骂／罵(mà) “scold”—high falling
吗／嗎(ma) “question particle”—neutral
