When enrolling, students have the choice between small group classes and private lessons. Both class types offer massive advantages for your Chinese learning compared to studying without a teacher, however private lessons offer benefits beyond small group classes. These largely stem from the extra flexibility of private lessons.

Content tailored to your learning needs

When you are the only student, the lesson content can be completely tailored to your specific Chinese learning goals. In a group, it is almost certain that everyone’s learning objectives will be a bit different. Since the learning objectives of the whole group need to be balanced, you might not get to focus on some areas of Chinese learning as much as you would ideally like to. Your goals are still important, and in a group class, the content will still broadly match your goals. However, you might not be able to cover them in quite the way you would want if yours were the only learning objectives being considered.

Flexible learning pace

Another advantage of being the only student in the class is that the learning pace can be flexible. Sometimes you will have lots of time and energy to devote to your Chinese learning. During these times, the pace of learning in class can accelerate to match your personal learning pace, and so you get to very efficiently convert your extra work by yourself into faster language learning progress, without feeling like you are being held back by your classmates. On the flip side, sometimes you will have less time and energy to devote to your Chinese study. During these periods, the pace of lessons can slow down to accommodate this, meaning you don’t feel left behind as the rest of the class continues to make progress.

Tailored homework

Outside the lesson, your teacher can give you more targeted homework for the specific areas that you need to work on. You can then discuss this homework during the lesson, giving you feedback that is most relevant to your weaker areas.

Flexible schedule

As well as flexibility of the lesson content, private lessons can also be more flexible with when the lesson actually happens. A regular lesson time is important for establishing a routine and good learning habits, but sometimes things come up that mean you can’t make the scheduled lesson time. In a group class, this will usually result in you simply missing the lesson, since it’s usually too difficult to try and find another time that works for everyone in the whole group. With private lessons, it’s no big deal to reschedule the lesson to another time that week. And even if you’re not able to reschedule, you don’t need to worry about missing anything, since the lesson simply doesn’t happen.

Good environment for speaking practice

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, private lessons offer the best environment for speaking practice. When you are listening or reading, it doesn’t matter how many other students there are, since everyone is consuming the same material and getting the same practice. But for productive competencies (speaking and writing), the more time you spend practicing, the better you will be. And since a lesson has a fixed duration, in a group, that lesson time has to be shared among all students. In a private lesson, you get to spend much more time speaking. This gives you a lot more opportunities to practice your pronunciation, your use of sentence structures and your understanding of vocabulary usage. And if you’re someone who is nervous about speaking in front of other people, especially as a beginner, private lessons give a much more gentle environment to start speaking Chinese as well.

As you can see, private lessons take all the benefits of having a Chinese teacher and supercharge them. While it is still entirely possible to learn Chinese to an excellent level in a group class, you will find that private lessons maximize your language learning efficiency.