I teach students who are keen to learn from zero knowledge but with a learning attitude and determination to delve into understand and appreciate the language.

My teaching method makes use of Chinese workbooks based around the Malaysian government's Chinese teaching syllabus.

Yes! Malaysian is home to the second largest Chinese community in the world outside of China. With Chinese culture integral to Malaysian society, the government runs Mandarin, Tamil and Malay schools where all subjects are taught in the school's language i.e. Mandarin, Tamil or Malay. This is on top of English and Malay (national language) which is also taught across the national syllabus with a strong heritage of British influence and tradition in our language, culture and political system with Malaysia once being part of the British Empire for more than a century.

Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing.

When it comes to any language, the fundamental thing anybody would tell you is that, "Use it or lose it". Hence, when it comes to learning, not only is consistency the key, but bravery, sheer courage to practice each of the four pillars is crucial. The four pillars: speaking, listening, reading and writing.

My aim for the complete beginner is to hold the student by the hand, guiding them through the complex clutter of various learning techniques to build a rock solid foundation in each of these respects. Most crucially, developing their strengths in knowing how to further their learning by themselves once I have imparted. In other words, learning how to learn Mandarin Chinese.

"Learning how to learn Mandarin Chinese"

Writing

I utilise material aimed at developing good practice in elementary character writing. This will include a couple of select workbooks that aim at imparting good practice on using the correct character strokes and order of strokes to construct each character. Understanding how Chinese characters are pictographic, meaning that each character's appearance comes from the physical appearance what it is associated with. Visually, materially and culturally. How one can almost guess at the meaning of a character by looking at its radical to understand what is associated to.

I push students to learn a set list of vocabulary each week to rapidly expand vocabulary and character recognition as this is fundamental.

Reading

Again, pushing my students to learn a set list of vocabulary each week to rapidly expand vocabulary and character recognition. Using simple workbooks that build sentences around a set of characters learnt at a basic level.

Speaking & Listening

There are plenty of dialogues to listen to on YouTube for elementary Mandarin. The tonal nature of Mandarin means that a large part of lessons would be focused on helping the student develop confidence in using the correct tone when speaking and listening with accuracy. In the end, it is also much practice so I strongly encourage practising in a huge variety of ways!

I also aim to use a fun approach to learning, sprinkling in accent comparisons between different Chinese speaking nations and in fact different parts of China. Tying that into the current political and history state of the Chinese people with the influence of modern day pop culture and social media so student gain a holistic understanding of the language, geography, people, history and culture.

Once students have laid the foundation of elementary Mandarin, I would strongly encourage goal-oriented learning by having them enrol in the HSK exam series.

I coach students across all aspects of the HSK （汉语水平考试）exam series up until HSK Level 4. After this, students would develop concrete skills in learning Mandarin and would have the capacity to aim for much higher HSK levels, converse fluently with a wide range of Mandarin speakers on almost any day-to-day topic and be comfortable using Mandarin Chinese with proficiency.