See how easy it can be to teach or learn Mandarin Chinese!

Professional Development for teachers of Mandarin and all World Languages in middle/high school and college

Custom Workshops

• General TPRS®
• Chinese-specific techniques
• Effective reading instruction

Multiple demo languages

• Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese)
• Hawaiian
• Spanish

Mandarin Chinese Classes Specializing in novices and people who have "tried and failed" to learn Chinese

Innovator in Mandarin teaching

• TOP Romanization
• Directional gestures
• Cold Character Reading

Teaching CI/TPRS® since 2000

• Ages 12-adults
• Spoken and/or reading
• Face-to-face and by Skype

Specialized Training in and for Mandarin Chinese.

I've been teaching with Comprehensible Input and TPRS® for 14 yearsnow, and the method has come a long ways since those earlier days of seven steps! Our current three-step focus on establishing meaning, providing input and reading makes it easier than ever to get your students (or yourself!) to acquire a new language almost without effort.

But Chinese is different from Spanish, French, and those other languages commonly taught with TPRS®. We have tones to worry about, both to remember and to perform correctly. We have a writing system that is not phonetic at all to a beginner, and which requires the recognition of thousands of unique symbols before something as simple as a newspaper article can be read and understood.

Mandarin Problems Need Answers Just For Mandarin

Most TPRS® workshops are general -- they are aimed at all language teachers. And most world languages present a different set of challenges. Presenters commonly explain and demonstrate how to teach conjugations and adjective agreement -- but they don't mention how to get kids to speak with tones, or how to actually teach reading when none of the words "look like" the sounds the student has been hearing.

As a Chinese specialist, I focus on providing innovative solutions for teaching and learning Mandarin using Comprehensible Input. Tone problems? Try the TOP (Tonally Orthographic Pinyin) romanization system, with its multimodal marking of tones, or delve into directional gestures for a kinesthetic component. Having problems getting kids to read fluently? Cold Character Reading will change how you look at Chinese texts forever.

Poke around the site, see the latest innovations in CI for Chinese, and take your Mandarin teaching or learning to the next level with Comprehensible Input!