Meet The Team: Hui Juan 慧娟

Hi, my name is Huijuan Chen. I am from Shanghai, China. I graduated from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, then I got a certificate for teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language(Mandarin). I have been a Mandarin teacher for 5 years, and I am fluent in Chinese.

I am open, creative and friendly. In my spare time, I have broad interests, such as gardening, singing, playing table tennis, enjoying music, writing and chatting with Chinese friends on Wechat, if possible. I have a balcony, where I like growing flowers; I sing Beijing opera; I enjoy playing table tennis with my friends, in a local playground; I live listening to music; I write short pieces of prose in Chinese; and I enjoy talking to my friends, as well as making new ones.

For the past 5 years, I have been teaching children Chinese, especially Chinese children born in England and British children. And through training 100 of children, I have discovered that how well somebody communicates in Chinese actually has very little to do with their Chinese level. It has a lot to do with their attitude towards Chinese. One of them that I remember was a student I will call Mary. Mary’s parents are British, so she has a lower Chinese level, however, in one lesson we were learning about being polite in Chinese and vocabulary. Hello, please and thank you. We were role playing in Chinese and Mary was pretending to be a host, and I was a visitor. She tried very hard and communicated very well, not letting her level affect her performance. Now her attitude has let her do her GCSE’s in Chinese. I am very happy and proud of her and her achievements.

I also use YouTube to tell Chinese stories to children, usually in Key Stage 1. If you would like to see them here is a link: https://youtu.be/7etcukNraaw , that is for my telling of the story ‘Hello’.