Our Story

Back in 2013, I was working as a software engineer at a travel company in Xi'an. Again and again, I heard the same frustration from visitors: they wanted to speak even a little Chinese, but had no good way to learn before or during their trip.

My wife, Ivy, had already spent years teaching Chinese as a foreign language and knew exactly what serious learners needed from a teacher. Between her classroom experience and my background in software, we saw a way to combine both and build something genuinely useful for foreign learners of Chinese.

We were convinced that experienced teachers, not flashy features, make a language school worth trusting. So together with our friend and co-founder, Doris, we started by doing the unglamorous work: surveying learners about what they actually struggled with, bringing in linguistic experts to design a proper curriculum, and recruiting experienced teachers who went through systematic training before ever meeting a student. Only then did we build the website and the systems behind it.

It took about ten months to bring it all together. On October 20, 2013, ChineseLearning.com welcomed its first student.