I had wanted to learn Mandarin for many years. I had married a Chinese girl in law school and stayed married for 14 years, visited Shanghai, met my inlaws, moved to China, had a Chinese wedding party, got a job as a professor, and lived here for almost five years, and I knew absolutely no Mandarin beyond Xie xie and Wo ai ni. Mandarin was completely hopeless to me. I had done Rosetta Stone, Hanbook, and anything else anyone could offer me. It was like whatever I would learn would leak out of my ears as soon as I learned it. This year, I decided to fix it, and I knew that I needed a classroom, because I had successfully learned French, but it took a classroom to learn it. So I browsed around and Silk Mandarin was at the top of the internet search. I came in, and Coco and I negotiated and haggled over the course of a few days for a deal that would get me the education I needed. Since then, in just a few months, my Mandarin has improved considerably. I'm a long way from being able to debate philosophy in Mandarin, but with a little imagination here and a bit of persistence there, I now find that I'm beginnning to navigate Chinese life. The education has already been indispensable, and just today paid for itself. Coco was completely confident and completely right when she said that if I had gone to any other school, I only would have come back to Silk Mandarin, because their teaching method works, and I've tried enough other systems to know that nothing else does. If you live in China, or if you need to learn Chinese, and it seems impossible to you, then Silk Mandarin is the beginning of the path up the mountain. It's worth the time and money.
