Chinese Classes in London
Is Mandarin Chinese Difficult to Learn?
With our Chinese Classes in London, studying Mandarin is not as challenging as some may think. You’ll discover that Chinese is actually quite a beginner-friendly language, especially if you begin by focusing on its phonetics. Our school boasts over 10 years of experience in offering these Chinese language classes in London, and we have developed a high level of specialization and skill in teaching this language to both beginners and advanced learners who are already proficient in English.
Furthermore, we have dedicated considerable effort to crafting our Fluency coursebooks and Hanzi coursebooks, which are currently being written and prepared for publication. These resources are specifically designed to help our students navigate the Chinese language system effectively and gradually enhance their fluency skills through step-by-step lessons with us.
Many of our students come to us with some learning history. That’s totally fine, because Practical Mandarin is the only school that offers all 6 levels of Chinese lessons in the UK. If you want to know where your level is, take a quick placement test below.
Chinese Classes in London – 6 Levels to Achieve Total Fluency
Our students are the reasons we push for improvements everyday
“Fantastic Course! I signed up for the 10-week beginner course and have thoroughly enjoyed learning Chinese with PM. The course teaches the Chinese language and culture at a challenging but manageable pace. I have met some new friends along the way.”
“I joined the beginner weekend class and I can really recommend it to everyone. The class is fun and the teacher engages and motivates you to keep up improving your language skill. Never had so much fun learning a new language.”
“I took the entry beginner 10 week course and it was all very very good! I enjoyed the lessons a lot, they were fun, interactive, varied and challenging – but at a pace where I could easily follow. We got to rehearse both speaking and writing, with many different tools from talking to each other to (highly) competitive quizzes. Our teacher Michelle has been great throughout encouraging us and teaching us the basics of a hugely interesting culture in an approachable and understandable way. I would recommend this to anyone interested Mandarin!”
“I’ve been taught at different points by four different teachers at Practical Mandarin who have all been outstanding. Especially big shout out to Jennifer and Coco who bring limitless knowledge, and energy, to their classes. I have seen my Chinese progress at a far faster rate than I expected- just need to keep going now!“
“Just finished the 12-week Advanced Beginner course and I will definitely be signing up for the next level. I’ve tried on and off to teach myself Mandarin, tried different online courses and even another in-person class, but always struggled to keep up motivation. The content from Practical Mandarin is extremely relevant, you can use what you are learning right away, and the lesson format and resources are dynamic and effective. It is very interactive and you really get to practice lots and build up week by week.“
3 Ways to Book a Group Class
Answers to 10 Questions you may have
We help over 1200 students each year to speak Mandarin! We do know what you are looking for, and how to help you achieve your learning goal.
It’s easy to learn Mandarin as a beginner, as you will be learning the very simple phonetic system, which composes only 490 syllabi! That’s why our Beginner students are the proudest of the achievements of their 0 to 1 step in just 10 to 20 lessons.
In your future total language skill training, it gets more challenging. But we know how to help you get there in each step.
Good question! If you are taking a part time learning approach with PM, we say 80 lessons upon completion of Intermediate course to achieve daily fluency. That could be 80 weeks or shorter if you chose to start with intensive beginner courses.
For an independent speaker level of fluency, we say two years upon completion of Upper Intermediate course. Be a good student, and we will get you there!
You can find the curriculum of each course on the respective course page on our website or our brochure.
We are using guidelines of official Chinese Proficiency Test called HSK to design our course framework.
Each course level will target different language skills training, ie Beginners for confident introduction and survival skills, Elementary for daily conversing covering common subjects, Intermediate for storytelling to narrate events, Upper Intermediate for discussion and debates to explain your reasoning and thoughts, HSK 5 & 6 for in depth discussion of society, culture and literature.
Let me try to use a very simple no jargon explanation – PM method focus on input, immersion and output.
You might find many language classes out there or learning apps only try to give you input, explaining how the language works to you, but at the end of the day, you felt like you learn something, but still can’t speak the language. At PM, each class is designed with a mix of learning, assessment and fluency skills output training modules. These training modules are unique here at Practical Mandarin, and are tested in many classrooms for targeted results.
You can see more details here.
On our website. We publish and update new courses on a monthly basis. Navigate to Group Courses on the top menu, find your level, and see all the available courses listed on the page, click the BOOK button to see all date / venue details. You will need to make tuition payment upfront in full amount to secure your place in the course. Our courses get booked out quite often as class size is limited, so please book the course as early as you can to avoid disappointments.
Our main center is in the City, close to Monument station by the river, where our headoffice team works from. We hold 70% of our classes for all levels here, as well as cultural events and workshops.
The other venue is on Charing Cross Road, it’s within an office building, where we use their comfortable boardrooms for evening classes. We hold beginner to Level 4 classes there.
We run group classes Monday to Thursday evenings between 6:30pm to 8:30pm, and all day Saturdays.
If the timing for our group classes do not suit you, you might like to consider private tutoring. We have tutors available seven days a week.
Our lessons are priced at £30 per two hour lesson, each course is either 10 or 12 lessons, you do the math. Advanced HSK 5 and 6, and Business classes are priced at £36 per two hour lesson.
It’s a course subscription model, ie we don’t accept pay-as-you-go, you will need to subscribe to a term of the course, either 10 or 12 lessons. If you join an ongoing course after its start date, you just need to subscribe for the remaining lessons.
We know sometimes your schedule gets jammed up. So don’t worry, with any group classes that you missed you will be able to attend a FREE mark up lesson with a different group (subject to availability), for up to two make-up lessons per term.
Alternative options would be private make up lessons online or offline with your teacher, or home study with teaching material provided. What’s more, our online platform is open for students with all learning material all in one place.