After many failed attempts and many stories of slow progress and bad organization, the lack of a reliable Chinese language school offering high quality Mandarin instruction became quite apparent.

In 2007 while living in a beautiful Hutong in old Beijing, he decided to start a Chinese language school to change that. It first operated out of a coffee shop in the Central Business District, just across the street from where we are located today.

The initial plan was to call it “Spaghetti Chinese” but thankfully a friend with a bit more marketing experience convinced him to use LTL (Live The Language) instead.

Those contracts included stable salaries and full social insurance packages with annual, sick and maternity leave as well as health, pension and unemployment insurance. Back then this was highly unusual, but the offer turned out to be a strong incentive.

Within a few months we had Beijing’s best and most experienced Chinese teachers working for us.

Tina worked as our Director of Studies in Beijing until 2013 when she took a one-year baby break.

Afterwards she moved with her little daughter back to her home town Chengde to lead our Chinese teaching team there.

Today Tina is our Director of Studies in Chengde, but still loves teaching and instructs students in the Chinese immersion program herself.

Our interior designer Ms. Liang Min from the Beijing Institute of Technology created a very bright environment that quickly became our and our students home.

She also decided to cover all class room walls with glass so they could also be used as white boards.

This allowed teachers to move around in the classroom and fit our inter-active and energetic teaching style very well.

Liang Min went on to design all LTL language schools, including the first school extension on the 19^th floor, the new one on the 29^th floor, and our Shanghai school.

Today, she lives and works in Milan, Italy.

Our teachers went to their homes or offices to teach Mandarin a few times a week after work. This meant we had only limited opportunities to get them to be immersed into a Chinese language environment and just a few hours of instruction a week were not enough for rapid language progress.

However, in 2009 we had grown enough to start focusing on our main mission: Rapid language progress programs for students to coming to China for full time study.

This meant offering a lot more than just language classes, as homestays, visas, social events and 24/7 support are vital for a successful program. In 2009 – our first year of offering this – we had a total of three full time students coming to study in China from abroad.

The first one (Susanne from Germany) arrived in June and stayed with our first homestay family in Beijing for two months.

The Zhang’s were a retired couple living in the building opposite of our school and friends of the uncle of one of our teachers.

Their son had got married and left home so they had a free room and plenty of time available. Mr. and Ms. Zhang had never been abroad, couldn’t speak a word of English and previously had never had any contact with foreigners.

It was an exciting experience for all sides. However, after sorting out the initial challenges both Susanne and the Zhang family loved it.

Susanne passed her HSK exam and came back to LTL the next year. The Zhang’s remained an LTL homestay until 2013 when they moved to another city to be closer to their son and granddaughter.

However, during breaks, social events and Beijing nightlife there was always a lot of temptation to speak English with other students, expats or Chinese who could speak English.

Knowing that this was less than ideal, we tried out a lot of different things, including a language pledge where students promised to not speak anything except Mandarin.

The results were not satisfactory. Students ended up learning each other’s grammar mistakes.

As Beijing is an international city, with a large expat population, international nightlife and increasingly more English speakers it became obvious to us that a complete immersion experience would not be possible in this city.

So we started to search for the perfect immersion city to learn Mandarin in. This was a lot more difficult than we had first expected.

Outside of Northeast China locals spoke very strong dialects which made immersion for a student of standard Mandarin impossible. The larger cities in Northeast China all had sizeable expatriate communities with a lot of opportunities to speak English and the smaller ones were rather grim industrial towns, not to mention the minus 40 degrees temperatures during winter.

However, after a lot of traveling and research we finally found our perfect city for a complete immersion program: Chengde.

China’s old summer capital was the birth place of Mandarin and standard 普通话 was codified in Chengde in 1952.

The city had no expatriate community whatsoever and nobody could speak English. At the same time, Chengde was a beautiful city with clean air, located in the mountains, a UNESCO world heritage site and home of the Old Imperial Summer Palace with amazing hiking and outdoor sports opportunities.

At half a million people the city still offered all the amenities of a proper city though and the locals were famous for their hospitality.

After countless meetings, phone calls and several days of deliberations they finally decided that there was nothing wrong with someone coming to Chengde to learn Mandarin.

We were allowed to continue the program. We had not expected how little even the government in Chengde really knew about foreigners and it was an exciting time for all of us.

Once all settled down, the three week program was a huge success and it became very obvious how much faster students can learn Mandarin in a completely immersed environment.

Our students are the only foreigners living in Chengde.

To ensure a complete immersion experience we never have more than ten foreigners study there together.

In a city of 500,000 people the chances of running into one of the other nine students are pretty small. The government today is very supportive and both officers who came to visit our first student later asked to become homestay families themselves.

Once she heard about a Chinese language school setting up shop, she immediately applied and quickly became one of our most valuable team members.

Once she heard about a Chinese language school setting up shop, she immediately applied and quickly became one of our most valuable team members.

Zhongwen today is our Chengde school director and very much the heart and soul of LTL there.

She organizes classes and homestays, helps students to make local friends, organizes hiking trips and is always there when someone needs help. Also after all these years she still picks up every student from the train station herself.

Today we offer many different gap year options for students in China.

They are always tailored and can include many different components from language courses, immersion programs, multi city options and internships.

However, those who follow the same path as Luke are the most fascinating for us.

Seeing a student who arrived in China barely being able to say “ni hao” leave with a HSK 6 certificate a year later is an amazing experience.

Also after we had seen how important our school balcony was for students to mingle and quickly make friends, we definitely wanted a place with a nice outdoor space again.

The massive roof top on the 30^th floor with amazing views all over Beijing sealed the deal for us and after five months of renovations – and plenty of trouble with the construction company – we moved into our new premises.

While most other schools got pushed out of downtown due to the huge rent increases in the next few years, we were lucky as we had bought the premises before prices went crazy and could remain in the middle of the city.

However, in 2015 long term LTL team member Alexander Krasnov decided to move to Shanghai.

This was finally our chance to bring our Chinese teaching and immersion expertise to another city.

Like in Beijing we built our Shanghai school right in the middle of town and kept the same concept of small Chinese group classes, a lot of social services, support, homestays, internships, and shared apartments with a focus on fast Chinese language progress.

They started with three weeks in international Shanghai where it is easy to settle into China, moved on to more traditional Beijing for another three weeks and finished completely immersed in Chengde.

In all cities they stayed in a homestay and took the intensive option with four hours of small group plus an additional two hours of 1-on-1 Chinese classes per day.

Both made it from complete beginner level to HSK 2 within those nine weeks and within just two months learned more about China than many do in their whole lifetime.

The program was a huge success and today the multi city program is one of our most popular options. Especially students who want to come to China for a longer period often on a gap year before or after university choose to study in two or three different LTL schools during their Chinese program.

Andy was from the USA and of Taiwanese decent. He often visited Taipei for business trips and grew up speaking some Mandarin at home.

Already having the basics, his main aim was to be able to speak Mandarin confidently in business situations.

He did four hours a day of one on one classes and progressed very fast.

Andy also wrote about his experience of studying at LTL Taipei, which you can find on our individual Chinese classes in Taiwan page.

LTL Taiwan has grown rapidly since then and is currently one of our most popular destinations to study Mandarin.

Whilst our local friends are heading down to the increasingly crowded Hainan Island, and Sanya, we decided to make a left-field move which has paid off hugely in the form of some very happy students, and a truly immersive Chinese experience.

Our first student in Beihai was Chris who came all the way from Ireland to study for 3 weeks in Beihai.

Our wonderful program manager/teacher in Beihai, Anna, looked after Chris (as with all our Beihai students) and gave him a unique insight into life in Beihai.

It helps she’s a local!

Our Beihai courses, due to the cheap lifestyle, are vastly cheaper than the equivalents in Beijing and Shanghai and provides our students with something truly different.

Needless to say Chris went home a very happy man and was the 1st of hopefully many students who take this rather different route to studying Chinese in China!

Visit our website to study Chinese in Beihai.

Xi’an is often referred to as a mini Beijing. But what does that mean?

When comparisons are drawn between Beijing and Shanghai, the former provides culture and history that Shanghai simply cannot match.

However, go to Xi’an and you see a city that is incredibly comparable to Beijing, just on a much smaller scale.

Due to this, we wanted to make sure our next move was here and in May of 2019, we made that dream a reality.

With courses now available in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengde, Taipei, Beihai and Xi’an we can truly say we are able to provide students of Chinese with all kinds of different aspects of life in China.

• Want something truly immersive? Head to Chengde.
• Want to experience big city life? Enjoy Shanghai.
• What about a slow pace of life in a smaller location? Go to Beihai.

Something for everyone!

Our tools have included:

• A Chinese Name Generator where you can create your own Chinese name.
• A Chinese Zodiac Calculator where you can not only discover your Chinese Zodiac, but also your lucky numbers and colours.
• A Chinese Pinyin Generator where you can actually type tones as you type Pinyin, something we absolutely love!
• HSK Vocabulary quizzes for all levels
• A Chinese Proverb of the Day, everyday.

Why spend time on these you ask?

Why not?

We genuinely care about every visitor that comes to our website and we want you to all feel part of us, so these little free tools are a small gesture of us giving something back.

The feedback has been great and we’ll continue to provide plenty more.

Check out our full list of Chinese Tools here. If you have ideas for further tools we could provide, let us know. We’ll be happy to create it!

Stephanie studied with us for 5 weeks and during that time we even welcomed our 2nd student!

We were delighted that Stephanie enjoyed her lessons with Teacher Tim so much she booked on for more classes.

Singapore is an interesting place to learn Chinese because Singapore actually has four official languages, Mandarin being one of them.

Despite the fact Singapore is largely English speaking it is also very easy to immerse yourself into Mandarin whilst in Singapore as there are so many communities you can jump between.

We are excited to welcome further students to this incredible and unique country in the coming years!

Congrats to Stephanie and Tim for being a part of LTL history!

We have all our usual range of courses in Singapore such as:

• 1-on-1 Classes in Singapore
• Group Classes in Singapore
• Semester Program in Singapore

Come and check us out!

Lex was proudly paraded to the world in January 2021 and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

We love having Lex around and he’s become a prominent part of our Flexi Classes, blog posts and our social media.

If you see him online, say hi 🙂

We had a good chat as a team and decided to go for it.

Our immediate target languages were Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

After spending plenty of time hiring the right team members we went to work at writing our own curriculum’s from scratch, just like we did for Mandarin.

Months later we were ready to launch.

Alongside Mandarin, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese we also teach a number of Chinese dialects including Cantonese and Taiwanese (Hokkien).

To this day Flexi Classes offers more than 10 different languages which are all available to study 24/7.

The school is based in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City, or know by the locals by the old name of Saigon.

From the original idea to the actual opening – this was the quickest built LTL school in history and much of the credit there goes towards the wonderful Margot.

We’ve welcomed our first students to the school and our Flexi Class team all work from our Saigon school.

Whatever could be next on the horizon at LTL… 👀