After months of planning and shopping around for plane tickets, I finally decided to check off “Visit Beijing” on my dreams list. One problem though, my Chinese is almost non-existent! I felt like I absolutely needed to learn at least a couple of basic sentences to be able to get around, so I checked and reached out to a couple of schools. Tonesheen Fly Academy was one of the first schools to reach out to me and invite me to check out their campus. I decided to stop by after visiting their website and reading their philosophy, which I thought was pretty interesting.Ms. Wang greeted me when I arrived and gave me a tour of the campus. The campus was well kept and colorful. The employees were very friendly and greeted me with a smile. Ms. Wang offered to give me a free demo class to see if I liked her teaching style, which I, of course, accepted. I liked the class a lot and she recommended the tutoring class so I could learn as much of the language before I went on my trip!The classes themselves were great. We started off slowly (my fault) but sped up as I started to get the tones and basic words down. Ms. Wang was incredibly patient and allowed me plenty of time to go over things I was confused about. We went over the basics in ways that really stuck with me and helped me a lot in the later classes. One of the things I really liked was the way the lessons tied in with Chinese culture. Food, travel, art, politics, and philosophy were all topics of discussion which was really engaging. In later classes we even started discussing and practicing Chinese calligraphy! I thought that was really cool!Overall I had a great time and learned a lot! I have a much better grasp and understanding of the language and the culture! Although I do have more to learn, I will definitely be able to get around! Thank you so much Ms. Wang!