Actually, the classes from Ellie and Stella were fun and I didn’t mind riding the long way to school on my scooter. Mandarin didn’t turn out to be the struggle I imagined it’d be. And despite having started to learn Mandarin not on my own initiative, I did take learning Chinese seriously, I even left a business trip in Hong Kong earlier to make it back on time for the class on Thursday. The South-African guy already spoke a bit of Chinese but by the end of the course, we were all level, sort of (Dare say, I even felt a little ahead, because I was the only one doing my homework). Pushed by my manager, I duly signed up for the HSK1 course with a group class, with a German girl and a South-African guy, and we’d do 36 class hours in 9 weeks. This school is where - aside from a few hours of sampling at Italki (online), LTL (online), and IMCPI (in Shanghai) - I’ve taken all of my Mandarin classes in almost five years, albeit with many different teachers. There was only one real school in the Yangpu district, where I worked, which was GoEast. The gap between Mandarin and Cantonese isn’t as big as English and Mandarin, but alas. She had worked in Hong Kong before, when her boss pushed her to learn Cantonese - so either she felt it was useful to her or she felt she had to balance out this wrong done to her - so she said I must learn Mandarin too. In late 2018, my manager at the advertising agency (native Chinese) pushed me to take Mandarin lessons. For some situations like registering a bank account, either the bank account has someone who can speak English, or you can bring a colleague to help you.Įither way, to solve two years of that marginal hassle, I wasn’t about to spend around 10,000 USD and +600 hours on learning Mandarin. You either point at pictures or show the translated sentence on your phone. In Shanghai, it’s OK to get by without speaking Mandarin. In the summer of 2018, I moved to Shanghai and back then I only planned to stay maybe two years in China, so I didn’t consider it necessary to learn Chinese.
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