Extreme Chinese Immersion

The Difficulties of Immersing Yourself

Nadia enjoying full Immersion in Chengde with her host family

Real immersion is a passion and a commitment that is not easily achieved. By the nature of it, at a Chinese language school other students studying with you will not be native Mandarin speakers. For that reason, the first people you will meet, study or go for lunch with in China will most likely be other foreigners. Also, international students tend to very quickly create their own bubble, as we are culturally much more similar to each other than to local Chinese and all can speak English. To make things worse, the Chinese who are used to dealing with foreigners, have an international outlook and whom it is relatively easy to make friends with, tend to speak pretty good English.

The same dynamic happens in pretty much all Chinese cities with foreign communities, independently of their size. While in Shanghai there are hundreds of thousands of foreigners to speak English with, in a city like Harbin or Guilin there might be much fewer. However as a result of being the only few foreigners in a very Chinese world, these smaller groups of foreigners studying abroad together tend to stick even closer to each other. Having even just a single English speaker around you can destroy an immersion environment if you meet and speak to that person every day. And in a culture as different as China, going for dinner with a fellow international students and English speaker after a tiring day of studying Mandarin is a natural choice. Also in many cities in China – especially the South like Kunming, Guilin or Guangzhou – people speak local dialects that are very different to text book Mandarin. Not understanding when locals speak with each other can make immersing yourself into local language and culture very difficult.

In many years of Chinese teaching, we have seen countless times that its exactly those dinners where you don’t practice your Mandarin, the possibility to speak English to get things done or hanging around with Chinese friends who want to practice their English are what holds students studying Mandarin in China back.

So we decided to change this.

How to achieve real immersion

We believe in real and true immersion. That is why we created the LTL Chinese immersion program to offer a true immersion environment for students who study abroad and want to learn Mandarin quickly. It was a long and difficult process, but we got there. Let us tell you how:

First we found the perfect city to learn Mandarin in China: Chengde

Chengde (承德) is where Mandarin was codified in 1952 and people here are known to speak the most standard Mandarin in all of China. At the same time very few people outside China know the city. This might be partly because a lot of people confuse it with Chengdu (成都), which sounds similar in English but is a very different and much bigger city in Southwest China – famous mainly for being the home of the Pandas. There are no international companies, no expat or international community in Chengde and you can stay there for years without even seeing a single other foreigner. Locals speak no English, as there is nobody to speak it with and one needs to use Mandarin to do anything here.

In Chengde you can enjoy full immersion – No English spoken anywhere

Second, we designed a course structure to free you from the temptation to speak English. All classes are taught individually and you will have no foreign class mates. Classes do not take place in one location with other students together, but are taught in your home or a tea shop close by. This ensures you won’t be going for lunch with other students or speak English during breaks. Homestays speak no English. Shared apartments are exclusively shared with Chinese flat mates. Finally, we keep the program small to make sure we don’t flood the city with foreigners. There are usually about three and never more than ten LTL students in Chengde, which is not much in a city of half a million people.

Third, we help you to settle into Chinese culture. Before you go we will have a pre-Chengde meeting with you, where you will tell us what you like to do in your free time. We will then put you in touch with locals with similar interests. This can be anything from joining a local football team, signing in a choir or participating in a hiking group to introducing you to some of our local friends to have dinner together with (people in Chengde love to eat).

You will speak, hear, and live the language 24/7. And that is what we at LTL (Live The Language) are all about. People often ask us (and sometimes doubt) how we can get a complete beginner to HSK 6 within a year. Well, this is exactly how we do it. Real immersion works. Check out Anthea’s video about her journey with LTL from zero Chinese to HSK 6 within a year of study with us for a genuine example of fluency within a year.