Which Course?

We are blessed to have several Mandarin courses for English-speakers listed among in the Links resources. A question that both teachers and students may face is: Which one should I/we use?

This reminds me of the question: Which one of the Gospel accounts should I read? Well, who said you could only read one? It is, in fact, generally recommended that we try to arrange to read and benefit from all of them! They have each been made available to us, and they each take a different approach, but they don’t have to be viewed as competing with each other. Rather, they can be viewed as complementing each other.

Similarly, each of the available Mandarin courses takes a different approach to teaching Mandarin, but they can also be viewed as complementing each other. Additionally, they are each also quite available—their creators have graciously made them freely available for use by those learning Mandarin for the field, and none of them are an unreasonable burden on download bandwidth or disk space.

So, why not download them all, look them over, and use whatever parts of each best suit whatever needs you or your students have? Situations and people differ, and one size may not fit all. You may end up choosing one course to be your main outline to follow, but you may also benefit from using parts of the others for certain particular things if you find they are particularly good for those things.