Survival Chinese

Do yourself a favor and give us 2 hours of your day after which you'll be able to communicate at a basic level. This course will go through important situations you'll be faced by and works perfectly if you're going to China but also as a good foundation if you're considering whether studying Chinese is your thing.

About the Course and DominoChinese

We are the first foreign-run Chinese (Mandarin) teaching company in China with a completely new approach to teaching Chinese. Our courses are constructed by foreigners for foreigners, and also include the wide experience of our Chinese teachers.

In this course, you will learn the fundamental concepts upon which you can easily build your Chinese language learning. By the end of this course, you will be able to conduct a simple conversation in Chinese with basic expressions, as well as the relevant reading and writing skills.

Chinese is the most logical language there is and we hope to demonstrate to the world how to successfully navigate it. Through the ancient system of using pictograms, two words with separate meanings can join to form entirely new words. For example, learn the word for electricity (电), then add brain (脑) and you get computer (electric-brain). Replace brain with stairs (梯) and you get elevator (electric-stairs). 话 means speech and 'electric-speech' means telephone. Chinese is a clearly structured, logical language, and it is this logic that makes the learning experience feel like a puzzle that anyone can solve.

We teach entirely through videos, where we first explain concepts and then show them in practice through dialogues with strangers on the street. Videos are shortened down to 1-5 minutes and to make sure you are paying attention we will give you quizzes between the videos based on what you have just learned. Pass it and move on to learn about the next concept.

When you sign up we will also give you our coursebook that helps you review everything you learn much easier.

Your instructor in this course is Felix Lattman, who founded Domino Chinese in Guangzhou, China, after spending some years in the city and teaching himself Chinese. To him Chinese made a lot more sense than it is generally credited with, and so he realized this language of 1.3 billion people should be very easy to learn as long as it is taught in the right way. In 2013, he started teaching Chinese to foreigners and within 3 months all of his students could converse in Chinese.

With Felix's approach to teaching Chinese combined with the other Chinese teachers' experience in the company we hope to improve Chinese teaching everywhere in the world and make it fun, logical and much more like "a walk in the park" for anyone!