Taking Advantage of Full Time Mandarin Course in Singapore

You may have been born and bred in Singapore or having a wish to settle there after arriving over there recently. If you are thinking of joining a full time Mandarin course in Singapore, then you have to consider a few things first.

Most of the critical aspects will be covered in this article, and the information may be sufficient enough to act as a starting point to help you to find the best possible option for you.

Do you have enough time on your hands? Do have any particular schedule in mind?

I had come to Singapore in 2006 with my girlfriend whom I married later. I had graduated recently and did not have any job to do during that period that I could get only much later.

I decided to attend a full-time course in Mandarin as I was free at that time. The course helped me to meet many interesting people and brought order to my daily life. Those initial five months became the base of my Mandarin learning experience in Singapore.

I found that if you attend classes on Mandarin continuously for 20 hours every week, you can cover the fundamental aspects at a single go. You can achieve your objective within a few months which would have taken you years if you had joined part-time classes.

It is a luxury that you may not have. Attending part-time courses is a good option only when you can attend all the sessions.

Do you have a Singaporean or a PR citizenship? Be careful to take advantage of the subsidies on offer.

Irrespective of your present level or being a Chinese, PR or Malay, the “Workforce Development Agency” or WDA will give you 90 percent subsidy if you want to learn business Chinese.

After you have completed this course, you will have to pass the “Business Chinese Test” or BCT, which is also offered at a hugely subsidized rate before you can start work.

The centers that offer courses in Chinese at subsidized rates are, –

• SCCIOB at the City Hall
• The Confucius Institute at Buona Vista
• Crestar / KLC at Jurong East

If you do not have a PR or Singaporean citizenship then I would not recommend the above institutes as options.

You should consider institutes other than the above three if you are unable to get 70 to 90 percent discount. The rates are quite high without any discounts as the size of the class learning Mandarin at these institutes is bigger than that in other institutes.

There are some small institutes that offer lessons that are of good quality, but offer reasonable rates. The timings and the locations of the institutes may also be very convenient to you. You can find the best one that suits you by looking around and gathering information about them.

Which level do you belong to?

You are lucky if you have just started as the content covered in most of the courses will be suitable for you to start with.

If your knowledge of Mandarin is at the intermediate or higher level, then you may find it a bit difficult to enroll in any Mandarin course in Singapore.

You will have a profile that is different from others if you are not an absolute beginner. For instance, you may speak Mandarin freely but your writing skills may need to be honed. In this case, the 60 percent time spent in speaking Mandarin in the class will be a complete waste for you.

The best way to take advantage of a part-time class is to ensure that the students in your class are having goals and levels approximately similar to yours.

It would be even better if you hired a private tutor or took Mandarin lessons through online courses.

A Success Story of Mandarin Course Singapore

It was my success story when I was trying to join a Mandarin Course Singapore. This story can help those who want to learn Mandarin and have a successful career in their businesses here.

Though I did not know any Mandarin when I arrived in Singapore, I had made up my mind to learn it. My friends encouraged me, and I was just able to scrape through my daily work with a spattering of Mandarin that I could muster which was not much. To learn more before going to work, I started getting up one hour earlier every morning and tried to go through the textbook that I had bought. The Chinese alphabets seemed like animal spooks, and I was further discouraged by friends who said things like “Learning to read Chinese is not required if you want to speak in Mandarin” or “You will get bogged down in trying to understand what each character stands for”. I was also told “Inability to read Mandarin is a sign of illiteracy.”

Even after being in Singapore for two years, I could not conversely freely in Mandarin. My attempts to study Mandarin proceeded in fits and starts. Construction of a sentence was difficult for me though I had come to know a large number of characters and words. I could use only small phrases made up of a few words for communication. It was just as if I was a caveman who could make other people understand what he had to say with the help of hand gestures and vocal grunts.

Once during my stay in Singapore I was involved with investors from China who wanted to establish various educational programs there. While interviewing a teacher about his experience and suitability for the job, I came to know about Extensive Reading (ER). He was excited about the effect of this form of teaching and the effect he had experienced while working at a Bangkok university as a teacher. When preparing students for the TOEFL, they had put one group through traditional classroom training program while putting the second group through ER training. They were surprised to find that the group that had gone through ER training did much better in the TOEFL test when the term ended than the group that had traditional classroom training.

It heightened my curiosity and interest about Extensive Reading, and I started doing some research on it. Can this method be as good as the teacher indicated? I started to go through papers written by academicians on the subject, discussed it with experts and read the reviews available on programs that have been identified as successful in the few coming months. I became more and more convinced about the superior quality of ER and understood the simplicity of it as I came across more and more evidence.

Though most of the research on ER was confined to the English language, I had no doubt that it could work for Mandarin also. I found only one series of reading materials in Mandarin, which were graded to be good and bought whatever books that were available in that series. As I was not very conversant with the Mandarin language, I could move very slowly as I started to read the first book. Even though I knew most of the 300 characters it had, I could not recognize them immediately.

I started to recognize them better after going through the first two or three chapters. I could finish the first book after a lot of slogging, but the second book took 30 percent lesser time than the first one as my reading speed picked up and comprehension improved. I started to understand the usage of words in various contexts and the grammar started to become more understandable. Once I surprised myself totally by laughing out loud after reading a portion of the story, and that too written in Mandarin.

I was astonished to find out that I was no longer translating the words from English to Mandarin inside my head to understand them. I knew what the words meant and could understand the words in Mandarin quite easily. I wasted no time in translating them, and my reading speed increased greatly. I could break free from the habit of translating that had been hindering my learning process for such a long time.

The change in me was noticed by my colleagues immediately as I started to understand and participate in their conversations by replying in Mandarin. I was able to read ten books within the first three months and was finally able to converse completely in Mandarin. When everybody asked how I could achieve this success, I only replied “just by reading Mandarin.” I could not give myself any credit for it as the process seemed so simple. I felt the power it gave me and felt the difference it created in me like the difference between day and night. I could brag forever that I can read any book written in Mandarin.

It was the turning point of my life in Singapore, and the world of opportunities opened up in front of me just by reading some books in Mandarin.