Mandarin
Chinese
Class

Jennifer is a superb Chinese teacher and supported my needs in learning Chinese very well. I worked with her to define my learning goals - pronunciation improvement, listening improvement, more fluent speech and conversations, improving my reading out loud, understanding more business oriented Chinese. Jennifer was excellent at catching the most important mistakes and working with me on them until I improved. And then we worked on the next problem. We often discuss the news, or a magazine article about my company, a work email, websites, menus, Chinese internet jokes or memes. I learned how to tell stories about things that were relevant to my life and hence could be used again and again with friends and colleagues, making it memorized and familiar. Jennifer is also a professionally trained teacher of Chinese to foreigners - she can accurately describe how to pronounce various sounds in terms of mouth shape, tongue position etc. She has a perfectly standard accent (but can also illustrate Beijing slang) and is familiar with common variations of Chinese you might encounter. She was very experienced in understanding my poorly pronounced Chinese and then over time improving it to much more standard pronunciation. And she was excellent at sticking to my request of almost always just using Chinese during lessons - despite it sometimes being a bit hard for both of us. So many times I struggled to explain something I wanted to say, and she would patiently listen and then help me not only say it, but explain how to more easily explain myself. And of course she is a professional when it comes to punctuality, preparation and confirming timing.