Learning Mandarin With BGA: The Curriculum

Beijing Gateway Academy’s unique Chinese language program are designed to immerse participants in Mandarin through class instruction, after-class personal tutoring and language exchange with native Mandarin speakers.

Accelerated teaching methods allow participants at lower proficiency levels to acquire the language skills needed for effective communication entirely in Mandarin in a short period of time, and intermediate students to gain the proficiency to express themselves at an advanced level within their future or current professional field.

There are two key factors that enable BGA students to succeed in their studies; its superb class-sizes and the personal content system.

Superb Class-Sizes

Beijing Gateway Academy has an average class-size of only three students per teacher, and a maximum class-size of six. This student-teacher ratio is about twice that of what most other private institutions offer, and five times that of Chinese universities.

This allows the Academy faculty to follow each student closely and tailor classes to skill-levels, goals and rates of language acquisition. This means that no student finds themselves in a position where classes are moving too fast to assimilate their content, or too slow, so that they are unable to make the most of their time as a language student in China.

The Personal Content System

What makes Beijing Gateway Academy truly unique is the ability of its students to focus their studies on the reasons they had for learning Mandarin in the first place.

When language students enroll at The Academy, an individual study plan is first formed. The faculty then creates a personal Mandarin textbook aimed specifically at their hobbies and professional ambitions.

The jargon of a person’s hobbies and professional life is simultaneously one of the most important aspects of any language, and one of the least studied. It is the least studied because you can't teach personalized content to a large group of students. This is why every week students sit down with a personal tutor for five hours to enable them to use Mandarin Chinese in the settings they envision to.