Scott A.

My daughter is 6 years old and she loves TutorMing!

I'm not a very ambitious parent but when I heard from my colleague in Texas (American guy) that he was taking online Chinese lessons he highly recommended, I immediately looked into it for my daughter (American through and through although both of us parents are both some form of Asian). We got the pricing information, then did a trial run with Betty about 10 months ago which went great and then ended up signing up shortly after.

She likes the teachers, the web-interface is reliable for the most part, and the company is extremely accommodating and helpful. Two examples:

1. I wrote an email to customer support and asked for some suggestions to get more immersive Chinese experiences outside of the online class, like some tv shows or some online chat. TM wrote back: don't recommend online chat for a 6 y/o because potential danger for kids, but here's a list of videos and links. It's pretty awesome to know there are real, caring people on the other end.

2. We were having some attention-span issues with my daughter to sit in the 40 minute class non-stop, and asked for recommendation. TM wrote back suggesting we run some 20 minute sessions until my daughter had the necessary attention span. We did shorter sessions for many months and they took care of the accounting on the back end tracking the sessions.

My daughter seems to be picking up Chinese quite well having gone through about 1 year of lessons (and we're about to signup for another year). Caveat: nobody in our family knows how to speak Chinese, but it sounds like she knows what she's saying... Two examples:

1. We were at Walmart for some reason (who doesn't like Walmart!) and ran into a fabric attendant who seemed obviously Chinese to my eye, so I egged my daughter on to find out. My daughter struck up a conversation with the lady for about 3-4 minutes. Now, I can't hold a conversation with a stranger for longer than 2 minutes unless we're talking about the weather. So it was impressive to see her whip out her vocabulary and have a conversation. I have no idea what they were talking about but I'm 95% sure it was mandarin.

2. At the playground, my daughter ran into a visiting scholar family from China with a young 4-5 year old who had been living in the US with the parents for a few years. They were friendly, and upon learning about their impending return back to China, my daughter began talking in Chinese, singing songs, etc. It brought tears to the Chinese girls eyes because (we were told) she couldn't speak Chinese all that well and the songs and language reminded her she about to leave the good friends she made in the USA, being forced to go back to China where kids would be 100% fluent in mandarin and she would be struggling to remember to speak. This story is a little sad for that kid.

TM seems to match up the teachers really consistently with my daughter, so she's running into the same one or two or three teachers on a consistent basis in series blocks (ex: same teacher like Winnie or Maddie or Ren Wu for a few classes at least before a change), which seems the a good way to be keep and track momentum of learning. We have, once, linked her laptop into Google Chrome so that we could listen-in on the course via the TV in the other room, and it's amazing to see in 3rd person real-time how she's interacting with the teachers, it's still hard to believe the quality of the 1:1 interaction; it's a tremendous value.

As a last couple of comments. As any father or parent would want less TV and mind-numbing activities and instead provide more learning and engagement for their kids, the booking system is great and allows for 12th hour booking of courses, plus the cancellation policy is really flexible too if something comes up as TM just ask for just 4 hours notice. We'll usually book anywhere between 3-5 sessions per week all at once, and if something comes up we'll cancel if we need to. This had made it really easy to keep my daughter busy during Christmas Break, Spring break, and through a lot of this summer with a learning activity that she enjoys (she's also doing swim and drums over the summer). Occasionally we'll ask her to go through the review quizzes (there is one for each class) and spend time on her vocab bank (which is a neat app within TM to track of words she learns) and as parents we should probably be more diligent about these resources; but for the most part she's spending her time 1:1 with the teachers.

In the very first session with Betty my daughter was asked why she wanted to learn Chinese and what I remember her saying is that she wanted to be able to speak with one of her friends from class plus something about China having a big population (or something like that). Since then, when we talk about where she wants to go to college (brings my wife to tears realizing it's in her future) China always comes up as an option. It's a bit selfish, but secretly the whole family wants an insider that can order from the secret menu at the Chinese restaurants in the area. We might also sign her up for a Chinese immersion camp or after-school program in her future.