Does the title of this article sound weird to you? That’s ok, we’ll explain in just a bit.
First off, who or what is T&L Club? T&L is an acronym for “Teach & Learn”. T&L Club is a Chinese startup in Shanghai consisting of Chinese teachers. They work as normal Chinese teachers at Chinese language schools for their day job, but in their free time they work on creating T&L Club: It is the place where teacher and student can find each other without the need of a school in between. It’s a bunch of awesome Chinese teachers that want to be independent and try teaching Chinese in more innovative and effective ways.
As part of being innovative, the founders of T&L Club wanted to learn more about Zizzle and its approach to teaching Chinese characters. Since it is often hard for teachers to understand the student’s perspective, they also wanted to comprehend the pain that is learning Chinese characters to foreigners. They wanted to know what makes it so difficult for non-Chinese people.
That is why on Saturday, September 19th 2015, the Shanghai based Tim of the Zizzle founder’s team held a speech on Chinese characters in front of ten of T&L Club’s Chinese teachers.
During 80 minutes of holding his Chinese presentation and interacting with the teachers, he made sure that everyone got to understand the perspective of non-native speakers learning Chinese characters:
Chinese citizens go to school for twelve years. During those years they mostly learn characters by writing them repetitively every day. Non-natives often take the challenge of learning up to 3000 characters in 1-3 years. Following his train of thought, the teachers understood that the methods they used when they were in school don’t necessarily can be used to teach non-natives.
Furthermore, Tim explained the Zizzle approach of learning Chinese characters. He explained our English tutorial in Chinese step by step, so that the teachers could also understand the English memory stories. At the end of his presentation, he even talked about the time, when he taught the character 潮 to his parents who had never learnt any Chinese. He taught them via FaceTime using the Zizzle method.
Saturday’s presentation was not only held to teach those participating teachers about character learning methods. It was also a briefing about our method. T&L Club’s teachers are planning to start using our material and method in their own classes. If anyone in Shanghai is looking for Chinese classes and is interested in teachers familiar with our method: Don’t hesitate to Scan their Wechat code below to get in contact.
We want to thank the great teachers at T&L Club for recognizing the potential in our method and are looking forward to working together on our mission to help people learn Chinese more efficiently.
If you liked this article, sign up now to stay updated!
