【WHAT…? Learning Chinese by Chinese?】

What is ‘Target Language-Chinese Teaching’ exactly? In a nutshell, it’s a learning method in which students are immersed in the domain/context of Chinese in a most natural manner, without any help of learners' mother tongue or lingua franca /common language-English as the intermediate translation. Students learned Chinese through natural acquisition, breaking away from the expressing interference they frequently encountered in code-switching.

Compared to ‘Translation-based Approach’ which most beginners might get used to in the early stage of target language learning, it’s easier to grasp the key elements through direct translation between mother tongue and lingua franca-English. Yet, in the entire course of language learning, students would undergo lots of specialized learning in order to truly master a great number of rules of vocabulary, grammar, verbal communication, reading and writing skills. Once students are accustomed to code-switching and depends chiefly on it in target language learning, they might encounter more difficulties in a later stage, since every language has its own characteristics and cultural train of thoughts, there is absolutely no single language can be entirely translated or replaced by another, notwithstanding its convenience and facilitation in the early stage.

CLC adheres to the ‘Target Language-Chinese Teaching’ philosophy, refraining from using students’ native language or English and uses Chinese only. The implementation involves natural, intuition, and subconsciousness way of ‘Acquisition’. Right from the very first day of school, teachers employ great number of visual materials such as pictures, real-life objects, multimedia visual effect as well as body language such as gesture, facial expressions, eye behavior, posture, and the like…as contextual clues. By using an inductive approach, students establish an immediate and audio-visual association between experience and expression, words and phrases, idioms and meanings, rules and performances through teachers' body and mental skills, learning is processed without any help of mother tongue or English. Students establish a direct bond between contexts, and helps in understanding directly what is heard and read. The input is entirely through Chinese and students learning it in Chinese in the same manner as the learning of their mother-tongue in the most natural way, then the output is also directly in Chinese. Thus, understanding and making use of Chinese becomes natural and easier. In the beginning, students might find the learning too slow and not making much progress, yet, little by little, they get used to listening in Chinese, thinking in Chinese, expressing in Chinese. Step by step, when the hard times are over, bitterness finishes, and sweetness begins. So, let go the original learning persistence, following our professional instructor’s guidance, enjoy the pleasure of thinking in Chinese and the joyfulness of speaking in Chinese.