Learn Chinese Manchester

Why learn Chinese?

Chinese is spoken by nearly a quarter of the world's population, more than 1.3 billion people. With China gradually opening up its borders, there is more and more opportunity now to visit that mysterious and fascinating country, either on holiday or on business.

If you feel like walking along the Great Wall of China, cruising down the Yangtze River, following the Silk Road, discovering the Forbidden City or hiking in the Chinese mountains, there is nothing to stop you! (For facts and inspiration, check out travelchinaguide.com.)

Perhaps you have recently started trading with China (are you a member of the China-Britain Business Council?), or perhaps you are interested to have a look at Beijing before or during the Olympic Games in 2008.

Whatever your connection with China, you will find your visits, holidays and business meetings vastly enhanced by being able to speak the language. It is really not as difficult as you might imagine. It takes a while to learn to write Chinese, to become familiar with the form and meaning of the characters, but there are a lot of excellent resources available to help you. Also, you don't actually have to write in Chinese characters until you feel ready - although it is useful to recognise some and be able to read a bit - because many Chinese nowadays are accustomed to Pinyin, a romanised alphabet for Chinese writing. You can read more about this on Wikipedia.

The grammar, however, is fairly straightforward and logical. Chinese sentence structure is similar to that of English (subject-verb-object), there are no irregular verbs, the verbs don't change according to tense as they do in most languages and there are no noun plurals to learn.

To get an idea of what the language sounds like, you can explore the Real Chinese section of the BBC website.

Inspired to learn Chinese?

If you live in or near Manchester, you could start a one-to-one Chinese course with us tomorrow (or whenever it suits you).

There is a large Chinese-speaking community in Manchester and you should have no trouble finding people to talk to in Chinese, to practise what you've learnt in your lessons.