Learning Mandarin in Sydney: Evening Classes?

[haydensydney]

Hi Team

Does anyone know of any adult Mandarin language evening classes that are held in Sydney CBD?

My friend and I are wanting to learn Mandarin but trying to navigate the many options is proving difficult (some could be dudds afterall). Would be good if the lessons were business focussed rather than travel/leisure focussed, but willing to look at all options.

I thought checking with the AFF crew could be a good idea to see if anyone has "been there done that" previously.

Thanks

Hayden

 

[harvyk]

Ni hao

Where about's are you planning on going? If it's only to one of the major cities eg Shanghai then Mandarin will IMHO only be of some limited use.
All the locals wanted to speak English (I lost count of how many times I said to someone "Hi hao" only to have them respond "hello") when I was there as English speakers got better jobs, and communicating with taxi drivers is probably easiest by pointing to places on maps, otherwise some "lost in translation" may happen and you'll end up doing three sides of a square.

About the only other useful word was "boo" (translation: NO!) which you get very used to saying to street peddlers as you walk through any of the alleyways.

If it's outside the major cities then some courses will help as English is not widely spoken outside the cities.

 

[haydensydney]

Hey

It's more for "future proofing" our career prospects. With the rise of China, i'm sure some basic chinese wouldn't go astry if applying for a job in Shanghai for example. That, and it would be good learning another language with a friend who is equally as interested

 

[harvyk]

Fair enough,

You'd probably find that any international company in Shanghai will speak English as either the primary language or at least a major language. When my sister went to work in Shanghai last year she had no Mandarin, but was able to pick up enough to get by very easily (plus she did a class locally). As I said most locals actually want to learn English as the better jobs are all English speaking jobs.

 

[Alanslegal]

Hi there,

There is this mob Learn CHINESE MANDARIN and CANTONESE in MELBOURNE and SYDNEY who hold classes in Ultimo though, near the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Pool. They have Wednesday night as well as some Saturday day classes.I haven't been but I do receive their notices now and then asking me to join as I need to to improve my on-and-off mandarin skills.

 

[yohy?!]

Hi there,

There is this mob Learn CHINESE MANDARIN and CANTONESE in MELBOURNE and SYDNEY who hold classes in Ultimo though, near the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Pool. They have Wednesday night as well as some Saturday day classes.I haven't been but I do receive their notices now and then asking me to join as I need to to improve my on-and-off mandarin skills.

I've done a Canto class with these guys and found the quality of the course not to be particularly great - the teacher was a young uni student from Guangzhou so it turned out that all my pronunciation of words was wrong for use in Hong Kong (where I am moving).

I would recommend buying some Pimsleur audio courses from Amazon as a starting point before investing in courses.

 

[wile_e]

Hi Hayden, an alternative suggestion for you. My wife is currently studying mandarin through these guys and has (so far) found them quite flexible in addressing her learning needs. I'm planning on starting in the new year after I recover from the last 3 years of formal studies...

As far as I'm aware, they're an 'online' school where you schedule your one-on-one class time with a native chinese speaker (located in China). "Classes" are held 3 or 5 times a week for 50 minutes via Skype (or other internet communication tools such as Windows Live so reasonable broadband is required), and you are able to influence the content of the lessons towards what you'd like to cover (i.e. business conversation, casual conversation etc). If you find that you're running late for your class, you are also able to reschedule or postpone it to a later date/time.

HTH

 

[Timtammi]

As someone who runs a company that does business in China I WISH I could speak Mandarin. My experience is quite different to those quoted on this thread. While you will have no problem when travelling in China without Mandarin (especially in the big cities) doing business is entirely different. Hotel staff speak English for sure as do airport employees etc. But when you are doing business its a different matter.

Our Distributor for China is based in Beijing and they speak very little english. They write english well (so email is no issue) but trying to talk to them face to face without an interpreter is very difficult and trying for both sides. I have found this to be very common in China, I believe in school they teach them to write english but not to SPEAK it so if you are going to be having business meetings, attend trade shows etc being able to speak Mandarin would be very helpful. I just came back from a week in China where we exhibited at a trade show and without 3 Chinese speaking staff on the stand we would not have been able to manage as SO MANY customers visiting our stand to see our products could not speak english, or were not confident to do so. And this was in Shanghai. Of course, as it was quite a large show many visitors were from all over China, not just Shanghai.

Actually my business partner and I find it so difficult to do business in China without having a mandarin speaker that whenever we travel to China we take an employee with us who is a native mandarin speaker. We could save a lot of travel expenses if we could do the translations instead!

Cheers

Timmi