Chinese tutors on the top of their game possess five key traits, from eagerness to education. Here we list our top five.

A great listener

A good Chinese language tutor isn’t someone who ‘bestows’ wisdom on a student, but rather takes them by the hand and guides them through the language. Learning is a two-way street, not single-lane traffic.

At GoEast we don’t let our Chinese tutors talk all the time: a conversation should happen. The teacher will talk and let the student repeat the newly learned words & sentence structure, answering in the words and phrases they can speak. A good teacher creates opportunities for the student to speak, and also sees which parts need to be learned more.

When student and teacher are familiar with each other, the teacher will know exactly which words the student knows and at which speed the student can listen. This vastly improves the efficiency of the class.

Adaptable

There’s no point in listening if the teacher cannot adapt. And being adaptable is only possible if there’s a wealth of knowledge from the teacher. If the teacher is on the limits of his or her knowledge, then there are limited tools available.

But education or experience (or adaptability and resourcefulness) make a teacher able to try something different. E.g.: If the student doesn’t understand grammar rule X explained like this, how about this example?

Making things look simple
Maybe this simply just refers to point five, and maybe this also refers to the curriculum designers of a proper language school. But a good teacher makes a difficult language look easy. She or he breaks topics down into steps, giving confidence to the student that she or he can make progress.

This is why, for instance, at GoEast we teach HSK1 and HSK2 before Hanzi — so that the student doesn’t get Pinyin & Hanzi and reading & speaking at the same time, but rather that she or he becomes conversational as soon as possible, before learning to read and write.

A good online Chinese tutor makes you think: “Wow, I never taught I could learn Chinese!”

Eager to see you progress

Every teacher motivates her or his students in another way, and whether you call it ‘motivation’ or ‘energy’ or ‘cheerfulness’, or whatever, it’s important because if a teacher doesn’t show some spirit, it’ll demotivate the student. We are calling it eagerness here. It’s an eagerness to see the student learn, to see the student succeed and grow as a speaker of the Chinese language.

Eagerness seeps into all aspects of teaching, from during the class to before and after. Our tutors, with the curriculum designers, prepare before the class so that the class runs smoothly.

During the class, eagerness is important because it spurs the student on.

Another word for this would be ‘patience’. When we did a survey a year ago, the most important quality that showed up was patience. Students need a patient teacher, who deals with the same questions or problems again and again, without losing her or his cool. Sometimes a student asks their teacher: “You hear me do this wrong for fifty times now, 没 and 不, don’t you get annoyed with me?”, but the honest answer is no. If you try hard and make an honest attempt, we are motivated to teach you! We know how hard it is to learn Mandarin, or any foreign language (the reputation of Mandarin to be such a difficult language really overshadows the real difficulty). And the student will feel that too.

Having the right educational background

No matter how amazing you are as a person (Maria Theresa wouldn’t make a great Chinese language tutor either), you need education. An education in being a teacher, and in Chinese language education makes you better at teaching Chinese. Period.

So this is twofold. One there’s education in being a better teacher, how to manage students, and how to impart knowledge.

And then a good Chinese teacher should be an expert in the Chinese language too. They know there and about 10,000 characters, and they’re fluent in a foreign language(s) — so that when you make a mistake in grammar, they know whether it’s because you didn’t understand the Chinese grammar rules, or because you are using the Germanic grammar rules of your mother tongue (such as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, and English).

There’s no substitute for this.

Which is why all our teacher are BS, MS, or PhD degree holders in foreign language education, and with some years of experience of teaching Chinese to foreigners under their belt.