Finding a good Chinese tutor is key if you want to learn the Chinese language correctly and in an effective way, but how do you know if your tutor is the right one for you? Here’s some things you definitely want your tutor to have:

1. Able to Adapt Teaching to Meet Your Needs
If you’re interested in learning Chinese for daily conversations, then you will need to find an outgoing, talkative Chinese tutor. Your best bet will be a native Chinese speaker, and preferably someone who’s up-to-date on recent news, trends, buzzwords, songs, movies, and other stuff that’s popular in China, so you can be sure you’re learning relevant and useful stuff.

Tutors for daily conversation Mandarin can be found anywhere (Craigslist, Facebook, language-learning sites). But if your goal is to learn Business Chinese, then you will be better off learning with an experienced, professional Chinese tutor. They’ll be able to teach you about industry specific terminology as well as Chinese business etiquette, like exchanging business cards, handshakes, greeting others, etc.

2. No Accent
Usually, people from southern China have more pronounced accents than northerners. For instance, people from Hunan Province tend to mispronounce the “n” and “l” sounds. Learning Mandarin from a tutor who doesn’t have an accent will prevent you from picking up accents that make it harder for you to communicate later.

3. Patience
Learning a language is hard work, and it can take a long time to be truly fluent in it. Based on this, a good Mandarin tutor shouldn’t rush you and should always encourage you to try again, to explain yourself in other words, and to employ newly-learned language. For students who can’t master a given language point, such as the pronunciation of a certain Chinese word, a Chinese sentence structure, or so on, the tutor should give extra examples and more tailored exercises to practice.

4. Various Teaching methods
Look for a Mandarin tutor who mixes it up with a variety of visual, audial, and contextual activities. Every student learns in different ways. Perhaps you’re the kind of person who needs to see something to remember or make sense of it, or maybe you learn best by writing it down a few times. No matter your learning style, your Mandarin tutor should employ a number of ways to get the learning point across.

There are four main aspects of Chinese learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing. While one activity may make use of flash cards, the next could focus on listening and repeating, and the following might be a real-life-scenario role play. To be more specific, listening to short dialogues and watching the news is helpful for your listening. For speaking, talking about a topic or retelling a story is useful. You can read story books or a novel with pinyin at the beginning to improve your Chinese reading. For writing, start from pictographs, which are stylized drawings of the words they represent. You can also use pictures to help. Let’s take the Chinese character “大(dà),” meaning “big,” as an example. Imagine that a man gestures how big an object is. Image that the man in the picture is a fisherman who is showing us how big the fish was that he caught yesterday. Visualizing this resemblance to the character “大(dà)” can help you remember the meaning and how to write it in the future.

One final question you may have is, “Where can I find a Mandarin tutor?” If you prefer a tutor who can meet with you in-person, you could call your local university to see if they can make any recommendations. Another option is to post a wanted ad in the paper or online. However, the downside of these options is that your schedule may not suit your potential tutor, and vice versa. Also, you should make sure to talk to references to confirm the tutor’s teaching experience and standard accent.

Another option you might want to consider is online learning through a reputable Chinese learning school. With this method, you can set the class time, you can learn from any place that is convenient for you, and you can rest assured that the instructor is qualified, experience, and native with a standard Chinese accent.