Hooked on Mandarin

Robbie Fried (right) and his brother Brad gave their dream a kick start with a $10,000 loan. Photo Provided to China Daily

Unhappiness with traditional classroom Teaching leads an American to open his own language school

If Brad Fried liked milk, there's no telling where his younger brother Robbie would be today.

When the elder Fried came to Beijing in 2001 as a 22-year-old native of Virginia, he was delighted to find that, unlike in the West, he did not have to worry that dairy products lurked in all sorts of prepared foods. Milk, cream and cheese were notstaples of cooking and food processing in China.

That helped him to settle down to a happy life as an expat, first as an exchange student and later as an English teacher in Guilin, a city in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. And that set the stage for his brother, who came out for a three-week vacation in 2006 and heard his own siren song.

"I'd been here about two days, and I was hooked," Robbie Fried says. "For me it was the language. My experience with foreign languages before was in a classroom on the east coast of the US. It was basically an academic exercise, with no tangible benefit.

"But when I came here, and saw how quickly you could connect with people, how excited my language partner was - it was just real."

So instead of going home after his scheduled holiday, the younger Fried spent two months memorizing vocabulary and then taking it to the street. The experience stimulated him to enroll in Mandarin study at a university. But instead of getting the boost he expected, he hit a brick wall.

"It was like I'd carried the old classroom experience across the ocean," he says. "There were a thousand foreigners studying Chinese - completely sectioned off from the university environment. We walked to class with other foreigners, where there was one Mandarin speaker in the room - the teacher. So English was the medium of communication among ourselves, whether in class or segregated in our dining hall."

In Guizhou with his brother, Mandarin had been organic and alive - a way to connect with people, to buy bread and cabbage, and to find your way in a new culture. In Beijing it was suddenly theoretical, something in a book. "I thought Beijing was amazing," he says. "But the class structure made it seem more difficult than it was.

"I saw a lot of my classmates were discouraged. It was the opposite from my own first experience in Guilin, when I was very excited about my prospects for learning."

Many Americans have an itch to learn Mandarin - instruction has grown by a factor of 12 in the past decade, he says.

"So at that point it was my goal to tear down all the barriers. Sparks flew when I combined three factors. There was a huge market for Mandarin learning, the quality of service was currently insufficient, and most foreign students were being overcharged."

Overcharged?

"Most foreign students - Americans, anyway - come to China to study through their home university," he says. "That means they are paying the US tuition rate."

Fried himself had chased scholarships and took out a student loan for courses that cost about $10,000 - only to discover he could have paid about one-tenth that amount by enrolling directly, if he had known how.

So the two brothers put together a business plan for Chinese Language Institute, where they would teach the way Robbie had learned from Brad - in bite-sized pieces, intensive but not overwhelming.

They approached a group of businessmen who worked with their father, borrowed $10,000, and CLI was born - in Robbie's dorm room at Tsinghua University. Soon the brothers had rented a three-bedroom apartment and held classes in the living room. They say a chalkboard was their biggest investment in teaching tools.

The Frieds had one student at first in 2009, four at the year-end winter term, and five the next spring. But they stayed focused. "I wasn't turned off by the low turnout," Fried says. "I was confident that we had something special."

By the end of 2010 they had 42 students, and the numbers have doubled each year since. The loan was repaid the first year, and the language school now thrives in a five-story building in Guilin with a strong base in the community. Despite its professional staff, CLI is still a family affair. A third Fried brother runs the company website, and mom Nancy Fried works as director of admissions from her home in the US.

Besides its own immersion courses in Mandarin, the institute runs a semester-abroad program at Guangxi Normal University, where it has 13 classrooms, and helps Americans secure English-teaching positions from middle-school to university level. That includes many Asian-American students who can speak perfect English and have a head start interacting with the culture, says Fried.

The brothers also negotiated a three-week study tour with Virginia Tech, Robbie's alma mater and spread word of their language school through a feature in the Washington Post as well as other newspapers. Virginia Tech students can claim course credits for studies done at the institute.

Programs last from two weeks to a year, and tuition costs from about $700 for two weeks to about $19,000 for one year, depending on the program and accommodation. The institute had revenue of more than $160,000 in its first year, Robbie Fried says.

Nicholas Gacos, a student in the inaugural study tour, told a Virginia-based reporter that, "We crammed so much learning into those three weeks. The things we did, and saw, and ate, and the people with whom we interacted. It was an unbelievable learning experience."

Robbie Fried says: "We took 17 students and three professors to Beijing and Shanghai during those three weeks." "They got a functional taste of language, studied international communication and Chinese history, and took part in a roundtable on sustainable tourism in Guilin. They visited media companies and government bureaus, and we had a great personal exchange we called 'speed dating' at a local university, where we put the American students on one side of the table and the Chinese on the other, and launched five-minute conversations designed to do away with misconceptions."

The Frieds think US President Barack Obama's project to boost the numbers of Americans studying in China from about 14,000 to 100,000 in four years is a great idea.

"It's a wise investment," says Fried, who is now 25. "And the starting point is breaking misconceptions about China, ideally with high-school students.

"Parents often hesitate to send their kids halfway around world to 'a Communist country'. A lot of Americans, especially from the baby-boomer generation, haven't realized how much China has progressed, how friendly people are, how developed cities are, how safe travel and the living environment are."

Nati Tamir, a retired diplomat from Israel who found the program on the Internet, says it is comfortable enough for all ages. He and his wife, Daphne, are nearing the end of a six-month course at the institute and give the Frieds top marks for making their studies successful.

Fried says CLI's oldest student has been a 72-year-old Chilean doctor, and the youngest a lively five-year-old American from Arizona.

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.