Learn Mandarin Chinese at Seattle Language Academy:
At the Seattle Language Academy (SLA), an acclaimed non-profit language school in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle our curriculum provides a first-year, a second-year series (201-204), and, for some languages, advanced reading and conversation classes.
Email: Contact us here ( or request a callback )
Recognition:SLA is accredited by NAAS—Northwest Association of Accredited Schools. If desired, we can provide credits and official transcripts for acheived coursework.
Courses:General Mandarin Chinese Programs; Business Mandarin Chinese Classes; Intensive Mandarin Chinese Courses.
Be Creative with Chinese:The word 'Chinese' does not refer to a single and distinct language shared by all Chinese populations; rather, it denotes a family of related languages, or dialects, first spoken in different regions of South and Southeast Asia. Traditionally, the main dialect groups of Chinese are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, and Hakka. Cantonese, as the language of Chinese settlements in North America and elsewhere, is best known in the United States. Mandarin, as the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan and as one of the official languages of Singapore, is the most widespread of the dialects.
Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. The most striking features of the language are the use of characters in writing and the element of tones in speech. All Chinese dialects use tone as a word-forming constituent: the same syllable, or word (tsu, monosyllabic unit) pronounced with a different pitch, will render different meanings. Mandarin Chinese makes use of four distinct tones; other dialects might have as many as ten or eleven. With only 400 or so syllables available to Chinese, it is tones and the use of compound syllables that multiply the number of possible words.
Written Chinese employs characters - variously classified as pictographs, ideographs or logographs - to convey meaning, each character being a distinct visual representation of an object, word or idea. The average Chinese speaker can recognize and write about 10,000 characters. Three to four thousand are needed to read the newspaper. One writing system was in use throughout China from antiquity to modern times and, remarkably, given the size of the country, underwent few changes. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1948, a new alphabet - simplified Chinese - was introduced to facilitate literacy. Thus two writing systems exist side by side, one in use in mainland China, and one - traditional Chinese - in use throughout much of Asia and among Chinese populations all over the world.
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