Learners often feel overwhelmed by what their teachers ask them to do: for each new word, remember the meaning, sound, Pinyin spelling, tones, characters, component parts and order of strokes. Whilst they are still struggling to remember all of this information, we ask them to work with lots of these words at once in texts! As a result, they all too often feel: “I can’t …”

Wo Hui Mandarin is our quest to tackle that problem, so that our students are both more motivated and more successful.

The written sections take a character-based approach, introducing 162 high-frequency characters which account for an average of 33% of any Chinese text. These characters are snowballed into 119 additional multi-character words. The goal for each written section is for learners to produce one or more hand-written texts to demonstrate what they can do with the characters and language points they have learned.