TLI Beijing Wangfujing Center ¨C My Review

I promised to review TLI Wangfujing a few times in this forum but I¡¯ve put it off because of a combination of studying Mandarin like a madman now and my laziness for writing the review. Better late than never¡­

I studied at TLI Wangfujing for approximately two months this summer from June to end of July. My Mandarin before that was a combination of using Pimsleur and Assimil and it gave me some VERY basic stock phrases to use when arriving in Beijing, but for all intensive purposes by Mandarin was very low when I got here. Since arriving in China I have experienced three schools ¨C TLI, a group class in Chaoyang with about 13 students, and now in Dalian, Dalian University of Technology¡¯s Chinese classes, which I¡¯ve since stopped going to, and TLI Dalian.

My schedule at TLI was 3 hours a day Monday through Friday. THIS WAS INTENSE!
Initially I arranged it so that I would start my lessons at 9:00 am and end at 12:00 pm but I was too fatigued from this. It really depends on what kind of student you are and what you¡¯re looking for, but for me it was hard for me to keep up in classes because at the same time, I had several other distractions which prevented me from really focusing on my studies to the fullest. On a good day I would study 2-3 hours outside of class and on a bad day I would study only 1 hour. If you want to reap the fullest benefits, come to class prepared. After my first month I switched my schedule so my classes started at 10:00 am and I had an hour break at lunch so I would finish at 2:00 pm. This was a lot better.

At TLI, we started off with a quick review of pinyin which I finished in a couple hours. If you go to TLI as a beginner, I do recommend that you know pinyin well before you come because it¡¯s hard to justify paying 110 RMB an hour for them to teach you pinyin unless price is no factor or your company is footing the bill. You can probably study by yourself or pay a student 30 kuai an hour to teach you that stuff. I didn¡¯t do their full pinyin course, but it was pretty extensive and I¡¯m sure your pronunciation will be decent by the end.

The books they use are published in house under their publication arm. The beginners books are Practical Chinese I and II. They are a strong point of the school, as the books are well-structured and give good English explanations of grammar points. These books, while using characters, focus more on pinyin, with characters written under the pinyin. I didn¡¯t read any of the characters when I used them which I think helped my speaking and listening develop faster. My only complaint with the books is that there are more typos than I would generally like, but overall this doesn¡¯t detract from the overall quality of them.

You can buy CDs with the textbooks and I really recommend them, especially for the dialogues and shadowing them. My complaint here is that while they had the audio for the vocabulary and main dialogue of each lesson, they didn¡¯t have audio available for the drills which would have been a big help in hammering in sentence structures in your head.

My teachers were generally good and well-prepared. Each hour I had a different teacher. They were generally good with grammar explanations. They have a certain methodology that isn¡¯t ground breaking, but solid in that students are given as much opportunity in class to speak, make mistakes, and learn from them. At the end of each lesson, you have a mini-test and a listening exercise (those of which I was initially horrible at).

A good thing is that the teachers and the school are very flexible with you. You can pick what books you want to learn from (although I recommend TLI owns for beginner and intermediate) and how you want to structure your lessons. I did not initially focus on character learning at the start, which I do not regret, but it has now put me in a weird situation where I need to learn a lot of characters before really moving up into the int-int level since a lot of printed stuff is character only.

If you go during lunch hour, several times a week you will have the opportunity to go out to eat with the teachers and staff which was pretty fun. You can practice your Chinese at the same time. There are a lot of cheap eats around the school, so it¡¯s well worth it if you want to maximize your time at the school.

Overall this school gets a thumbs up from me. Right now I¡¯m in Dalian taking TLI lessons from the Dalian center and they are more or less the same. I did try a few classes at Dalian University of Technology (without paying in advance) and found that hand¡¯s down, 1 on 1 instruction is so much better than university classes for improving your Chinese. Whether it¡¯s at TLI or any other school, there¡¯s no comparison. The main thing is having opportunity to speak in class, and having targeted instruction based problem areas a student may have. The downside to one-on-one class is there isn¡¯t the social setting being in a university allows. At TLI I did make good friends with other students, but it¡¯s not the same as being in the same class with them. Socially, it sucks but it will probably help your Chinese in the long run because you¡¯ll do less socializing with people who speak your mother tongue.

Here¡¯s my advice for people thinking about TLI and how to maximize the money spent ¨C

1.) I think 12 hours of instruction a week is plenty. I would do three hours per day Monday/Tuesday, rest/review Wednesday, and three hours per day Thurs/Fri. There were quite a few students doing four hours a day Monday through Friday but I¡¯m a little different in that I need my brain to work and assimilate the language in my head. A student told me there was someone who did 6 -7 hours a day of one-on-one per day before I arrived. It makes me tired to even think about that!
2.) I averaged 1 lesson/chapter from the TLI books more or less per day. Each lesson vocabulary ranged from 30-60 words I think. Sometimes so much vocabulary is thrown at you that it makes learning grammar less effective because you¡¯re always wondering what these words mean that the grammar gets lost. I would ask them if you could purchase the books 1-2 weeks in advanced, learn 20-30 words a day and Supermemo the vocab. It will make learning the grammar a lot better and the listening exercises will be more pleasant to do.
3.) Bring a tape recorder. You never know what useful sentences you can wind up recording. I¡¯m very big on comprehensible input, shadowing, and that sorta stuff. Recording the listening exercises at the end of the chapter and listening to it in your spare time will only improve your Chinese.
4.) Buy the CDs that accompany the texts.
5.) Use Supermemo or any of the other SRS programs out there. Just do it.
6.) This is just my opinion, but I feel like I made the right decision in doing pinyin first instead of characters. This eases your transition to the language at the beginning.

That¡¯s all.

Mike