How to find the perfect Mandarin tutor for you: A complete guide

A great tutor can accelerate your learning, but finding one isn’t easy. To get the best results, you need to be patient and try many options.

Finding a tutor is both easy and hard. It’s easy because there are many options available, both online and offline, but it’s also hard because most tutors are not very good.

Most native speakers or advanced learners can help you learn, but not everyone is equally suited to the task.

If you pay for someone to help you, you should expect more than if a friend decides to help you out. You can afford to be picky, or rather, you can’t afford not to be picky; you’ll waste both money and time!

Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#258).

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!

More about tutors and teachers on Hacking Chinese

1. How to get the most out of your Chinese tutoring sessions: The student side of the equation
2. 7 characteristics of a great Chinese tutor or private teacher: The teacher side of the equation
3. How to find the perfect Mandarin tutor for you: A complete guide

The best tutor is rarely the first one you try

I tried to estimate how many teachers or private tutors have helped me learn Chinese in some personal manner (i.e. not counting formal courses) and ended up with around fifty.

All these people have been able to contribute to my learning, and I’m immensely grateful for that. However, many of them have also been incapable of helping me in certain areas, or they’ve varied greatly in how good they are at supporting me in different ways.

If you take one thing away from this article, it should be that you must try several tutors before deciding which one(s) to keep. I know, it’s tempting to try one, think they’re okay and stick with them, but you’re extremely unlikely to find a good tutor on your first try.

How do you know when to stop trying new tutors?

How many tutors you should check is hard to say, but you can use the 37% rule as a guideline (also see Optimal Stopping Theory). This essentially means that you should sample 37% of the total number that you might consider trying to get a feel for what “good” means, then pick the next option that is better than those you’ve already tried.

This is not fully applicable to finding a tutor, because, unlike when finding a romantic partner, you can usually go back to earlier options and try more than one tutor at once. Still, it emphasises the importance of sampling enough tutors to realise what a “good” tutor means.

Don’t settle on a tutor too early

Still, stopping too early is bad.

What if you had found a great tutor on your fifth or eighth try, but you settled for an okay one after two tries? By missing out on that, your learning will suffer, and you might enjoy learning less. Most tutors, at least online, have a trial session which is either free or cheaper, so you lose little by trying more than one.

The advantage of paying someone to help you is that you establish a professional relationship. Trying something out and deciding it’s not for you is not a personal betrayal or insult; it’s part of the setup.

How to tell if a Chinese tutor is good or not

I strongly suggest that you read my article 7 characteristics of a great Chinese tutor or private teacher before you start trying to find one. You probably won’t find someone who checks all the boxes, but it’s good to know what to look for. Naturally, there are also subjective preferences, but I don’t need to tell you which kind of person you tend to go along with well.

7 characteristics of a great Chinese tutor or private teacher

You should also check my article How to get the most out of your Chinese tutoring sessions, because what you bring to the table as a student is at least as important as what the tutor brings.

How to get the most out of your Chinese tutoring sessions

Online or offline Chinese tutoring

One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is whether you want an in-person tutor or an online tutor. At first glance, this might seem like a practical decision: if you can find a tutor who can help you offline, in person, that’s better than going online.

For most people, and everything else being equal, I think this is true. Meeting someone in real life and interacting with them is simply more engaging than doing the same thing online. Physical reality also has a higher bandwidth than cyberspace, so some things work better offline. For example, chorus mimicking is tricky to do in a laggy Zoom call but easy in person offline.

However, online tutoring has several advantages as well, even if you have access to offline tutors.

• Wider selection of tutors – Unless you live near a major teaching college with a program for teaching Chinese as a second language, you’re unlikely to have many good options locally.
• Practical and efficient – You don’t need to spend time to go meet a tutor physically; you don’t even need to go out. Depending on where you live, this could be a major advantage.
• Safe behind a screen – If you’re an introverted learner or suffer from any kind of speaking anxiety, talking with somebody online can be easier than doing so in real life.
• Sharing notes and resources – When tutoring online, it’s possible to share videos, audio clips and use a wide range of digital tools to enhance learning. As a student, you also have easy access to all this after the session.
• Cheaper – It’s likely that an online tutor will be cheaper, especially if you can make your schedule work with tutors in China. Depending on where you live, wages are probably lower in China compared to locally, so you can expect to pay a lot less.

Still, most people, including myself, prefer to interact with people in real life. Fortunately, you don’t have to choose! Nothing stops you from having more than one tutor.

Where to find a tutor offline

Considering that I don’t know where you live, this section will be more general than the following one, talking about finding tutors online.

First, if you live in an immersion environment, you have so many options that I won’t even discuss them in detail here. Check universities, search online, ask friends (both native speakers and other learners), and visit a local language school. And so on. Your main problem is not to find a tutor, but to find the right one.

Second, if you don’t live in a country where Chinese is widely spoken, your options are more limited. You will probably have to balance finding a good tutor with the risk of being too picky and not finding anyone at all. Still, there are a number of options:

• Local universities – There are two options here. First, most universities will have students who speak Mandarin. If they study computer science or economics, they probably aren’t professional language teachers, but they might still be interested in helping you. Second, check Chinese language programs, either by asking teachers there or students, who might know more about whom to ask than you do.
• Local tutoring companies and agencies – If you live in a major city, there are probably organisations that offer tutoring services. Search online and see what you can find.
• Online tutoring services and platforms – This might seem counterintuitive, but many places where you can find online tutors also list where the tutor is based. You might be able to find someone in your location this way.
• Local meet-ups for Chinese learners – Depending on where you live, there might be local meet-up groups you can join. I have hosted several one-off meet-ups in different countries over the years, and all sorts of people show up, including veteran learners and native speakers. They might either be able to tutor you directly or know where to find one.

How to find a Chinese tutor online

As mentioned, the advantage of going online is that you have many more options. Too many options, perhaps. Simply searching for “online Mandarin tutor” will yield hundreds, if not thousands, of valid results.

These can be sorted into roughly three categories: online language schools and teaching services, online tutoring platforms and content creators.

Before we have a look at each, I want to make it clear that listing a service here does not mean that I endorse it in any way or that you’re guaranteed to find a great tutor by using them. I have tried a few of them, but unless you happen to find exactly the same tutors I did, which is many years ago now anyway, my recommendation means nothing.

• Online schools and teaching services – These are organisations where you can join classes or study with a private tutor. There is usually a selection or vetting process for tutors, making them a more reliable option than free-for-all tutoring platforms. How reliable it is depends on the school or service. Some might also have specific profiles or tutoring programmes that further unify the learning experience, for better or worse. Examples that I have heard good things about (no affiliation): Manhattan Mandarin, LTL Language School,  Keats School, Taipei Language Institute, ICLP.
• Online tutoring platforms – These are services that connect tutors and students. Unlike the above, it’s not a school as such, and the platform has no vetting process and relies entirely on student reviews to rate teachers. It’s an open marketplace for students and teachers; in other words, rather than a school. Expect to try a few more tutors before finding a good one. Here are the most popular examples: iTalki, Preply.
• Online content creators – Many YouTube channels, podcasts, and social media accounts offer tutoring to support their content. If you follow a creator you like, consider hiring them as a tutor. This helps both your learning and their ability to continue producing content. I can’t recommend specific tutors since it depends on your preferences, but even I rely on tutoring, coaching and feedback options for my courses to sustain Hacking Chinese.

Great tutors: Seek, and ye shall find

Studying with a tutor, even if irregularly and infrequently, can be immensely helpful, but only if you find the right tutor. In this article and the previous articles in this series, I’ve tried to help you navigate this question.

Knowing what you want is only the first step; however, you also need to go online and see what’s on offer. You need to do this many times until you find someone who’s a good fit. It can feel frustrating, but it’s worth it!