Hi, I'm Jingyao

I grew up in Chongqing — a city built on hills and rivers, where the streets stack on top of each other and everyone talks a little faster than the textbooks suggest. That is the Chinese I want my students to be able to handle: the real one, spoken by real people, at real speed.

Most people who come to me have tried an app, a textbook, or a big class before. They can recognise words but freeze the moment someone actually speaks to them. So we start from the other end: you speak in the first lesson, even if it is one short sentence, and we build outward from there.

I am patient with mistakes and strict about pronunciation, because tones are the one thing that gets harder to fix the longer you leave it. We correct gently, immediately, and often — and then we move on. Nobody learns a language while feeling embarrassed.

The other half of my job is context. Why that phrase sounds rude. Why nobody says the sentence your textbook taught you. What actually happens when you walk into a restaurant in Chengdu or a meeting in Shenzhen. Language and culture arrive together, or neither of them sticks.

And I want lessons to be something you look forward to. We talk about food, cities, films, your work, your week. If you are enjoying it, you show up — and showing up is most of what learning a language really is.