When working on Mandarin Express Intermediate Level A, at the end of each chapter, students are required to present something for at least five minutes on a topic they select. 

Over the years, there have been some amazing speeches. Two weeks ago, a particularly timely one was delivered by Nathan. There were some really good thought provoking gold nuggets there. 

This is an inspirational story from a colleague working in a university in Trinidad & Tobago, Janine L. 

Dedicated and hardworking, she shares her past learning experiences and talks about what it took to get to where she is now.

A fact that all Chinese language learners will eventually learn by personal experience is the changes of tones and pitches. Shared by Tony many years ago, this hilarious recounting of his personal experience will definitely put a smile on your face, as it did to all of us. That was the reason that he wrote it down.

One of the hardest working students at MSL Master, Mr Hui, recently completed the entire MSL Master Mandarin courses. He started from Mandarin Express Intro Level A years ago and finished at Intermediate Level B.

Upon “graduation”, he had some thoughts on learning Mandarin, especially on learning the last textbook, Mandarin Express Intermediate Level B. He wrote a long review “Learning Mandarin through appreciation of Chinese classics”.

Student's post, by Adam C.

I began taking Mandarin lessons with MSL Master / April Zhang in June 2015, starting essentially from scratch. Shortly before studying with April, I had short-lived experiments with two other Mandarin tutors, but I left both of those tutors fairly quickly without picking up much of use -- it was too frustrating to be taught by someone who was unenthusiastic about teaching, and was simply reading straight from a textbook with which they were barely familiar. 

Student's post, by Keong:

It's often said that learning Chinese (Mandarin) is very difficult. When considering the truth or otherwise of that virtual cliché, the reality is that learning ANY foreign language presents all sorts of challenges – particularly when at that stage of learning (and it is a long stage) where you are relying on memory, when language ability is not yet at that level which can reasonably be described as 'fluent' and there is no practical opportunity for immersion.