Tea has its own language. Its names evoke mountains, colors, shapes, aromas, processes, and places; and a large part of that vocabulary comes from Chinese.

Mandarin Chinese for Tea – Level 1 It proposes a different way of approaching the language: starting with a world that already has meaning. Instead of studying isolated words, we learn Mandarin through tea culture: we build the foundational skills for pronunciation, comprehension, reading, and writing while discovering the names and descriptions of some of China’s finest teas.

The course begins with the basics of Mandarin pronunciation and tones and progresses through the six major categories of tea.  Green, yellow, white, oolong, black, and post-fermented teas thus serve as gateways to the language: their names, regions of origin, characteristics, and forms of presentation allow us to learn vocabulary within a real-world context.

Throughout the course, we also cover numbers, units of weight, parts of the tea plant, and basic verbs, combining language and culture in a progressive and practical learning experience.

It's not about learning Chinese just so you can talk about tea. It's about starting to understand Chinese. talking about something that already invites us to learn it.