LingoBus
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
LingoBus in a nutshell
LingoBus is an online school that can help make your child conversationally fluent in Mandarin Chinese and a fluid reader of Chinese Hanzi characters in just a few years. Our family’s experience proves that.
LingoBus is an engaging program that kids truly enjoy. Comprising a lower level Speaking and Listening course as well as a higher-level Reading and Writing course, LingoBus can challenge kids well into their teenage years.
LingoBus also offers four lesser-known classes: a Picture Book course, a Public Speaking course, a Novel Reading course, and a brand new conversation class called FluentFlow.
This article is an organized walkthrough of all of the courses and learning resources that are offered by LingoBus. One of the great strengths of LingoBus is that it offers an entire platform for Mandarin Chinese teaching, review, listening comprehension, and reading practice. But some of these learning materials can be a little hard to find.
Even if you have been using LingoBus for a long time, you might not know about some of LingoBus’s best resources, buried deep in its website interface. In this review I’ll take you on an organized walk through everything LingoBus has to offer.
You can get a free LingoBus trial class with absolutely no commitment by following my special link. If you decide to buy a LingoBus package of classes, both you and I will get extra classes if you sign up through this link.
This article is long. The table of contents on the sidebar to the left is simplified by necessity. To get a good overview of the entire structure of LingoBus, or to find key information easily, you may optionally click on the link below to see a detailed, hierarchical table of contents for all of the sections and subsections of this article.
Introduction
The business of blogging is all about grabbing eyeballs. I’m guessing that $15,877.99 worth of language lessons is apt to grab a bunch of ‘em. While that $15,877.99 figure is 100% accurate — yeah, our family has really spent that much on LingoBus lessons — the bigness of the number is straight-up clickbait. Almost half of that expenditure was made just last month, as I bought LingoBus lessons by the hundreds during Black Friday sales in an effort to assure both of my kids continuous Chinese study for the next few years.
I put those big eye-catching numbers front and center because I want readers to know that our family has some serious skin in the game and a very long history with LingoBus.
The company that makes LingoBus is one of the biggest and best purveyors of one-on-one online Mandarin Chinese lessons. LingoBus has helped us take our older son Sam方平山 from a beginning Mandarin Chinese student to a fluent speaker and literate reader, despite the fact that neither me nor my wife are competent speakers of Chinese. I hope that by sharing our long experience with LingoBus, we can help other parents who have a serious interest in leveling up their kids’ Mandarin Chinese.
Rest assured you don’t have to spend crazy amounts of money to get a lot of value out of the LingoBus program.
The LingoBus experience in a nutshell? After about two years of intensive classes and with less than a $5000 USD expenditure, kids can attain conversational fluency, highly accurate pronounciation, and strong Hanzi reading ability, even in the absence of Mandarin-speaking family. LingoBus can be a key pillar to support kids’ Chinese learning, and can help parents learn how to plot and navigate their family’s Mandarin learning journey.
What is LingoBus?
LingoBus is a platform for online one-on-one Mandarin Chinese lessons with a native-speaking teacher. LingoBus targets kids 4 to 15 years of age. Using stories, games, flashcards, and interactive activities, LingoBus teachers guide young learners through a highly structured curriculum to gradually teach them Mandarin Chinese.
The core LingoBus classes that most people know about include the Speaking and Listening course, the higher-level Reading and Writing course, and the beginner Group Classes. LingoBus also offers three other little-known courses to students who finish those two tracks: a Public Speaking class, a Picture Book class, and a Novel Reading class. And in late-breaking news, just as I was preparing this article for publication, LingoBus announced the availability of a brand new conversation-focused class called FluentFlow.
LingoBus Speaking and Listening classes
Most LingoBus students take the lower-level Speaking and Listening track, which consists of 25-minute classes. Speaking and Listening engages young kids with recurring storylines featuring a collection of friendly cartoon kids from around the world. “Aiwen”, “Dodo”, “BeiBei” and other young characters travel the world and learn Chinese together. Speaking and Listening consists of six levels of 60 classes each, for a total of 360 classes.
LingoBus Reading and Writing classes
The higher-level LingoBus track is called Reading and Writing, but in our experience it should really be called Reading and Reading. The curriculum primarily consists of reading Hanzi (Chinese characters), without any Pinyin, Zhuyin, or other forms of transliteration. Reading and Writing consists of 269 classes spread across six levels. Classes in levels 1 and 2 of Reading and Writing track are 25 minutes long, while classes in levels 3 through level 6 are 50 minutes long. LingoBus has published a tentative roadmap that suggests the Reading and Writing curriculum will eventually be extended to level 12.
LingoBus Picture Book course
The LingoBus Picture Book course invites students to read classic Chinese stories in picture book form, and then to explore those stories deeply through discussion and other learning activities. Chinese traditions and history are discussed in the course of the class. Students are invited to discuss the story characters’ experiences, and relate those experiences to their own lives. The course comprises 15 lessons of 50 minutes apiece. Here’s a glimpse of my older son Sam方平山’s first lesson in LingoBus’s picture book course:
It’s natural to assume that a “picture book” class would target younger learners. That isn’t necessarily the case. For more advanced students, the class can become a forum for wide-ranging conversational practice, as you can see in the video above (my apologies for some of the janky translations, which were done by a machine.) The teacher did a great job of redirecting and returning the conversation to the cultural themes and history expressed in the book. At its higher levels, LingoBus has the potential to be a form of paid conversational practice mediated by a highly trained teacher.
In a few weeks Sam方平山 will post a written review and video review of the Picture Book course to tigerba.com.
LingoBus FluentFlow
FluentFlow is a brand new conversation course that LingoBus started advertising just a couple of weeks ago. It is intended as a supplement to LingoBus’s existing curriculum. You can schedule and take FluentFlow classes while also taking the regular LingoBus classes. For now the only FluentFlow classes are a relatively basic “level one”, but LingoBus is working on developing level two and level three. I started my younger son Thomas小方糖 with FluentFlow at the start of last week. We noticed a few things about FluentFlow:
- Conversation is strongly emphasized, while reading skills and reading practice are de-emphasized. The regular LingoBus classes ask students to read Chinese, either as Hanzi Chinese characters, or in transliterated Pinyin form. In contrast, FluentFlow plays audio recordings of all textual content. The Chinese characters and transliterations are shown, but there is always an audio recording to support the learner.
- Each FluentFlow lesson is premised around a three-part “mission” that the learner must successfully finish by completing language learning activities
- There is a rich use of graphics, sound effects, interactive activities, and other multimedia. One of my complaints about the regular LingoBus curriculum after level 4 is that it strays from the strong artwork and branding that characterize LingoBus level 3 and below. FluentFlow captures some of that old LingoBus magic – I really like it.
Have a look at the videos below for an early glimpse of FluentFlow. We will publish a more complete audio and video review of FluentFlow on tigerba.com in a few weeks.
Speak Up Chinese
Speak Up Chinese is a little-known LingoBus course designed to practice public speaking.
Speak Up Chinese is divided into two levels. The first level targets lower-level learners and has 36 lessons at 25 minutes each. Students talk about pictures, describe stories, and attempt easy oral recitation. The course goal is to help students learn to express themselves clearly and boost their confidence in public speaking.
The higher-level Speak Up Chinese class encourages logical expression, story creation, detailed discussion of a topic, and rhetoric. The goal is to practice sophisticated public speaking.
LingoBus Novel Reading course
The LingoBus Novel Reading Course is yet another class that few parents involved with LingoBus seem to know about, in part because it requires that students possess higher-level Hanzi (Chinese character) reading ability. Consisting of 15 classes of 50 minutes apiece, the course is a deep dive into the Chinese translation of George Seldon’s classic children’s novel A Cricket in Times Square. The course encourages students to study the novel carefully in a series of discussions. Students analyze characters and their motivations, explore themes, and carefully consider the author’s use of language.
Stay tuned to tigerba.com for an in-depth review of LingoBus’s novel reading course.
LingoBus “Group Classes” (spoiler alert: not really)
LingoBus also offers an amusing and inexpensive “Group Class” for beginning students. I put “Group Class” in quotes because while it seems to place a group of multicultural kids from around the world into one class and engage them in friendly language learning competitions, it is in fact simply a prerecorded video stream, with your child as the only real student. If you’ve seen shows like Sesame Street where actors pretend to “talk to” your kids through the TV, waiting for their replies and pretending to listen, you know what to expect in LingoBus’s group classes.
These group classes have the kids participate in competitions and races involving Chinese learning, and lo and behold, your kid always wins. If your kid is under the age of 8, there’s a good chance they won’t ever catch on to the fact that the group class is prerecorded.
LingoBus’s packages of group classes are actually quite a good value, coming with 24 “group lessons” and 12 one-on-one lessons for about $350 USD. The group lessons are a good choice for parents who are on the fence about the idea of online language lessons. The group lessons offer parents a low-cost way to try out the LingoBus curriculum and decide if they are interested in a bigger commitment.
How do I get started with LingoBus?
Your LingoBus journey starts with a free trial class. You can book your free class here. You should take this class if you are at all curious about the LingoBus platform. The first lesson is 100% free and there is no commitment whatsoever. The teacher will assess your learner’s ability and figure out where to place them in the LingoBus program. The trial class is a great opportunity to observe your learner and figure out if the LingoBus program is a good fit for their learning styles.
LingoBus equipment and software requirements
You connect to the LingoBus platform using any modern computer. It is possible to use only the Chrome browser for lessons, but LingoBus recommends you download their PC or Mac app for enhanced stability.
For the last few months we have been taking lessons using only the Chrome browser on an Chromebook Plus laptop, and LingoBus has worked perfectly on that platform.
For your first trial lesson, you will arrange a date and time with a course consultant.
LingoBus class package options and pricing
To take classes beyond the trial lesson, LingoBus asks you to buy a class package. These are sold in 25, 50, 100, or 200-lesson packages. The bigger a package you buy, the cheaper the classes are on a per-class basis, and the longer their expiration period. When you run low on classes, you can buy more. As of late 2024, the price of a 25 minute class is about $12 a class if purchased in quantity. LingoBus has periodic sales, typically once or twice a year, and its classes are cheaper if you buy during these times.
Using the LingoBus online class scheduler
Once you have purchased a package of lessons, you will use the LingoBus online scheduler to reserve classes at the times, days, and with teachers of your choosing. In general you can reserve lessons about a day in advance to approximately 13 days in the future.
I really like how LingoBus allows you to schedule lessons flexibly. There are now a bunch of online schools teaching Mandarin Chinese. Most of them have you commit to a set schedule of lessons on a fixed day. For families with busy schedules or that actively travel, LingoBus’s flexible lesson scheduling makes it much easier to work lessons into each week.
LingoBus’s scheduler also makes it possible for you to decide which teacher you want to teach a given class. There are hundreds of LingoBus teachers. In time, you will settle on a few favorites. These favorites will appear automatically on the “Frequently Used Teachers” dropdown on the scheduler interface.
My feeling is that learners learn best when you vary their teaching inputs. We have about a half-dozen LingoBus teachers that are a particularly good fit for our family, and I make a point of cycling between them.
Anatomy of a LingoBus class
Lower-level LingoBus Speaking and Reading lessons generally follow the same predictable structure:
- You navigate to the LingoBus study site at https://www.lingobus.com/study/, log in, and click on the “Enter Classroom” button about five minutes before your class is scheduled to start.
- The teacher greets the student. They may engage in some light conversation.
- Teacher and student read the title of the lesson.
- Teacher and student sing the LingoBus Unit song together. If the child is shy or uncertain, the teacher will sing along with the child.
- The teacher leads the student through a series of interactive games and Mandarin Chinese conversation.
- The student is encouraged to read some Chinese characters. At higher levels, the child will start to read entire sentences or short paragraphs, echoing the content introduced in the class Audiobook.
- Toward the end of the lesson, students are often encouraged to practice writing one or two Chinese characters.
- The teacher wishes the student a fond goodbye.
- Within a few hours, the teacher sends written feedback about your learner’s performance in class. For the lower-level Speaking and Listening classes, that feedback is in English. For the higher level Reading and Writing class, that feedback is in Chinese Hanzi. Non-literate parents can run this feedback through Google Translate if necessary.
My experience is that this feedback varies widely in quality and detail. The best feedback offers specific ideas for how your learner could improve, including sentence examples and grammar points. Some LingoBus teachers consistently offer this detailed feedback and some do not. Over time, I tended to favor LingoBus teachers who provided detailed commentary to help us improve.
One strength of LingoBus’s one-on-one format is that the teacher can make the lesson easy or difficult depending on learner ability and mood. If the student is struggling, the teacher will step in with verbal prompts and other forms of assistance. If the student is breezing through the material, it is easy enough for the teacher to ask complex questions using advanced vocabulary and grammar. One reason LingoBus is so effective is that it precisely tunes the difficulty of each lesson to the demonstrated abilities of the student.
Our advice: Six steps to success with LingoBus
- Before each lesson, sing the Unit song, watch the video, and read the audiobook together. This process of review typically takes between a half-hour and 45 minutes.
- Sit with your learner through their entire lesson! There is a magic to both student and teacher knowing that they are being watched. Encourage, reassure, and praise your learner as necessary. Try to keep the experience light and fun for them.
- After each lesson, work on the lesson worksheet together (if available – the worksheets aren’t offered by LingoBus until you reach Level 4.)
- Review the “preview” and “review” flashcards associated with each lesson. There’s usually only three or so. I suggest you also keep a collection of flashcards with critical vocabulary in an online format like Quizlet or Anki.
- Read one or two titles from LingoBus’s online library of books together with your learner. As soon as is possible, try to read the Chinese characters without the crutch of Pinyin transliteration. LingoBus’ library makes it easy to turn this transliteration on and off.
- There is a magic in consistency! I recommend a steady schedule of two to three LingoBus lessons a week. One of the great things about online learning is that it is possible to take lessons anywhere in the world you happen to be. We have taken LingoBus lessons in hotels, restaurants, parking lots, airports, Berlin beer gardens, zoos, Disneyland, and dozens of other places. Online learning works almost everywhere.
Higher-level fluency and literacy with LingoBus
We have had remarkable success as a result of online Chinese language learning, and LingoBus has been a key part of that success. LingoBus has helped both my older and my younger son become conversational in Mandarin Chinese.
I’m going to be writing up a more detailed article on tigerba.com about how exactly we trained Sam方平山 to Mandarin fluency and Hanzi literacy, utilizing primarily online resources. I think it’s an interesting story because my Chinese is quite bad and my wife’s is nonexistent, and we have no Chinese-speaking family to help us. It’s an optimistic message for other parents who value Chinese fluency and literacy. If we can do it, almost anyone can!
For now, the short version of that future article involves a collection of recommendations:
- Take two to three LingoBus classes a week, reviewing old material and practicing new material before and after each class
- Watch a lot of Mandarin-language Peppa Pig on YouTube, ideally at least an hour a day. If you have several people around, you can have a lot of fun with this. Assign roles to each member of your family, and act out the scenes together!
- Find some other form of daily Mandarin language practice, ideally an online class focusing on Hanzi (Chinese character) reading in a one-student, one-teacher format. For us, this took the form of daily one-on-one classes with InstantMandarin.com. In 2020 Instant Mandarin classes could be purchased for less than $5 a lesson. InstantMandarin closed at the end of 2024, but you have a other options:
- One-on-one tutors booked on iTalki.com. Stay tuned for a future article on tigerba.com that shows you how to find an awesome, affordable iTalki teacher or conversational partner.
- Play a Mandarin learning game like Wukong Shizi or iHuman Shizi
- Take “Everyday Mandarin” classes through Motherly Notes School
- If you have the money for it, you could have your children simultaneously take classes through Wukong and/or LingoAce, both of which offer kid-centered curricula. We have taken many lessons from both of these providers and recommend them.
Getting ready for class with LingoBus Study Materials
The Study Materials are all accessible using the left-hand interface at the main LingoBus study page at http://lingobus.com/study .
Study Materials: Video
The LingoBus video is a two to four minute introduction to the vocabulary and grammar that will be used throughout a particular lesson. In Level 3 of the Speaking and Reading track, these videos often feature Dodo, Aiwen, Beibei, and other characters who meet up and travel to interesting places around the world. Both of my kids grew to enjoy seeing what adventures the LingoBus characters were up to with each new lesson.
Study Materials: Audio Book
The lesson Audiobook expands on the vocabulary and grammar introduced in the lesson video. The Audiobook also provides reading practice. Chinese Hanzi characters are printed big and bold, while Pinyin transliteration is printed underneath the characters. Parents of advanced readers may want to use a piece of paper or a card to shield this transliteration from view.
Many of the sentences in the Audiobook have a speaker icon next to them, which indicates that learners may optionally practice making recordings of themselves reading the Chinese characters. My younger son always loves to do this kind of practice, recording himself reading and then giggling when he plays it back.
Study Materials: Flashcards
LingoBus typically provides “review” and “preview” flashcards that you can study online. One side of the flashcard has a picture, Chinese Hanzi characters, and Pinyin transliteration of those characters. Clicking on the flashcard triggers playback of an recording of a native speaker reading the character, and the character meaning is described in English.
There typically aren’t very many flashcards for study before and each class, usually just three or four. I wish that the LingoBus offered a way to review a big “stack” of all of flashcards encountered in previous classes.
Study Materials: Worksheet
Starting in Level 4, the LingoBus curriculum offers printable worksheets to accompany each lesson. This is a change from Level 3 and is easily overlooked by parents who are already settled into a familiar LingoBus routine. An answer key is provided for each collection of worksheets, and instructions are offered in English. Even parents with minimal Mandarin Chinese skills should be able to assist their kids in their LingoBus studies.
Reinforcing learning with LingoBus Unit Materials
Often overlooked by parents and kids using LingoBus, the Unit Materials offer many opportunities for practice and review. They also provide a succinct summary of essential grammar and vocabulary introduced throughout a particular unit.
Unit Materials: LingoBus Workbooks
The LingoBus workbooks are printable PDF files filled with activities, exercises and games. The are a part of the LingoBus curriculum up through Level 5, Unit 7. A “Workbook Audio” file also appears in the Unit Materials section, and is necessary to complete some workbook exercises. Activities include vocabulary review, drawing projects, Chinese character writing practice, and reading and listening comprehension exercises.
Unit Materials: Game Cards
Game cards is a kind of flashcard game involving identification and matching. It can be played by one or more people. As with many of LingoBus’s unit activities, it is print-based, meaning you have to print out a PDF and cut out the pieces. There is accompanying online audio recordings in the Unit Materials section that will help your learner with pronunciation. The game cards are a part of the curriculum through the end of LingoBus level 4.
Unit Materials: Words & Grammar List
The Unit-level Words & Grammar List is an organized list of all new words, characters, and grammar introduced in a particular unit, along with their meanings in English. There are also grids for practicing handwriting of new characters from the unit.
Unit Materials: Song
As we all learned in Kindergarten, singing songs is a great way to memorize vocabulary and learn new grammar. Songs also support higher-level skills like reading. Each LingoBus unit in Level 3 features a new song, and the LingoBus crew have made a video to accompany each of these songs. In every LingoBus lesson in Level 3, the teacher will sing the Unit’s song with your child. The song video provides more opportunities for practice outside of class.
These songs are really catchy. My younger still sings many of these songs word-for-word, years after he first encountered them in lessons.
Unit Materials: Writing Sheet
LingoBus writing sheets are an opportunity to practice Hanzi character handwriting, and reinforce the vocabulary used in a particular LingoBus unit. Like other unit materials, they consist of a PDF file that must be printed. The first two pages of each PDF packet provide a refresher course of stroke order and essential character components.
LingoBus Resources
LingoBus Resources are all located on the left-hand interface at the main study page at http://lingobus.com/study.
Resources: The LingoBus Online Book Library
The LingoBus Online Book Library consists of more than 300 picture books, divided into seven levels of difficulty. Learners can read the books, selecting Pinyin or Hanzi characters as they wish, and listening to recordings of the book being read by a native speaker. The interface also allows learners to make their own recordings. This is a great resource for students and parents of all ability.
Learners can browse a virtual bookshelf and pick out titles they want to read.
All of the books in Lingobus’s library offer the option of Pinyin transliteration. This transliteration can be turned on or off by clicking on the gear icon.
Press the “play” button, and a professionally-recorded native-speaking narrator will read the page. This is really well done. As each character is read, subtle yellow highlighting jumps to the active character.
Resources: Animated Chinese Characters
This section features little animations that are meant to function as visual mnemonics to help kids learn Chinese characters. The webpage somewhat clumsily links to 205 separate videos, each video 25 seconds long. It would probably be more useful for most kids if the videos were united into a single long YouTube video, with chapter notations allowing kids to skip to Hanzi characters of greatest interest.
Resources: Chinese Chant
The Chinese Chant section simply aggregates all 30 songs that appear through the lower levels of the LingoBus curriculum in one place. You will eventually encounter all of these songs if you simply do the preview and review through the class interface. However, if you want to browse all of the LingoBus songs, this page consolidates them on one webpage.
Resources: Coloring Book
This resource consists of two printable book-length PDFs featuring Chinese characters and Lingobus-themed art. On one page a Hanzi character is printed large, and on the facing page Dodo, Aiwen, and other members of the LingoBus gang illustrate the Hanzi character. The artwork is a black and white outline, so your learner can have fun coloring in the picture. Grids to practice character writing are provided. Each book features 28 characters.
Resources: Daily Chinese
Daily Chinese is a collection of 38 super-short videos that discuss single items of useful vocabulary. They’re typically 30 seconds to a minute long. The word and its meaning are introduced, and then there is a short dialogue between two people where the vocabulary is shown in the context of a typical conversation.
Resources: Activity Book
The LingoBus Activity Book features games you can play in the real world with friends. The book is a 36-page PDF document that can be printed out and cut out to create the game pieces for a bunch of different group games that practice Chinese: “Fast Reading”, “I Spy”, “The Blindfolded Game”, “Lucky Number”, “Scissors, Clothe[sic], Stone”, “The Passing Game”, “The Crawling Game”, “Passing the River”, and “Let me Guess.”
Resources: YCT Vocabulary
YCT Vocabulary offers a bunch of flashcards that practice vocabulary from the YCT (Youth Chinese Test) curriculum. However, to make the flashcards, you need to print out four PDF documents, cut them up, and (unless you are an expert at two-sided duplex printing) paste the card front and back together somehow. This resource was obviously originally intended to be provided to customers as a preprinted and perforated book of flashcards. Unless you like extended craft projects you may want to pass on this resource. You could use the documents for vocabulary practice without going to the trouble of actually turning the contents into flashcards, as intended.
Resources: 2019 and 2020 New Year Treasures
The “2019 Year of the Rat Treasures” and “2020 Year of the Pig Treasures” are obviously a few years out of date, but they are very nicely designed 30 page PDF booklets that includes games, language exercises, activities, couplets, and other things that will probably engage young learners if a parent is willing to facilitate. As with many other things in the “Resources” section, these documents must be printed to be usable.
Resources: Mei Sound Library
The Mei Sound Library is easy to overlook. In fact, I overlooked myself it until I started organized research for this article. The Mei Sound Library doesn’t appear in the “Resources” section until your learner is enrolled in the higher level Reading and Writing curriculum. Parents like me tend to think they know the contents of the LingoBus “Resources” section, and don’t realize that these contents can change as the curriculum changes.
The Mei Sound library is a collection of interesting audio recordings for students with strong Mandarin Chinese listening comprehension. It includes professional recordings of short stories, personal reflections, Tang Dynasty poetry, modern poetry, Chinese history, and World War II history. Many of the recordings seem to be made by speakers with ties to China Central Television (CCTV) , China’s central television broadcaster.
Despite the spartan appearance of the cover page for the Mei Sound Library, there are a ton of recordings if you drill down into its content. The Mei Sound Library offers more than 600 recordings by 104 different speakers. Transcripts accompany each recording, allowing serious learners to practice their listening comprehension and do exercises off of this recorded material.
LingoBus Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How long will it take for my kid to become fluent and literate in Mandarin Chinese with the help of LingoBus?
The speed of your attainment will depend on many factors. I can tell your our experience. When my older son started with LingoBus in August 2020, I would characterize his skills as minimal (around HSK1, if you’re familiar with China’s formalized assessment of Mandarin Chinese competency). Sam方平山 was a beginner who could express only very basic things. Within a year to two years, he was conversationally fluent and could read Hanzi fluidly. Within three years Sam was winning Mandarin-language speech contests against kids whose parents spoke Mandarin Chinese at a native level. Within four years he was participating in native-level Mandarin debate classes organized by Dr. Oliver Tu and taking native-level Math classes from China-facing companies with classmates who are PRC Chinese nationals. LingoBus was Sam’s very first online curriculum, and has been a key pillar in his learning.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Your ultimate success using LingoBus as a base for Mandarin language learning is going to primarily depend on two factors:
1) How consistently your learner takes lessons and does necessary review, and
2) How many other Chinese learning inputs and learning challenges you provide for your learner. No single language learning program can assure fluency and literacy on its own. If you want the best results, you will need to supplement with other resources. Over the coming weeks and months I will be exploring many of these resources on tigerba.com.
How long will it take to complete the two main LingoBus tracks?
The amount of time required to complete LingoBus’ various tracks will depend on several factors: where LingoBus starts you in the curriculum, how frequently you take classes, and whether you elect to repeat any material.
I can tell you our experience. There are 360 classes in the LingoBus lower-level “Speaking and Listening” track. My older son Sam方平山 took just under two years to complete “Speaking and Listening”, taking his trial lesson on August 19, 2020 and finishing the last class in the curriculum on June 11, 2022. My younger son Thomas小方糖 started “Speaking and Listening” on June 21, 2021 and is still working through it – we elected to repeat the entirety of level 3 so as to really reinforce the vocabulary and concepts.
There are 269 classes in the LingoBus upper-level “Reading and Writing” track. My older son Sam方平山 was tested at the end of the lower-level “Speaking and Reading” track, and LingoBus elected to have him skip over much of the “Reading and Writing” curriculum. Sam had taken hundreds of classes through InstantMandarin, and was a competent Hanzi reader at that point. Even skipping most of the classes, Sam still took about two and half years to work his way through “Reading and Writing”. He started “Reading and Writing” on June 23, 2022 and completed it on January 5, 2025. We obviously took a much more leisurely pace with “Reading and Writing”, in part because the material was more complex, and in part because Sam became increasingly involved in many other Mandarin Chinese learning activities (Wukong, Motherly Notes, LingoAce, Mandarin programming classes, Mandarin debate classes, Mandarin art classes and others.)
What do you recommend I do to get my learner ready for a LingoBus class?
With young kids, I act very excited as our LingoBus class time approaches and say something to the effect of, “oh boy, Dodo and Aiwen are coming to visit soon!” I spend a half hour to 45 minutes doing the Study Materials described in detail in the next section of this post. And then I will incentivize the child by reminding them that if they do a really good job in class, they can earn one kind of prize or another. I half-jokingly call this incentive-based parenting. I’m gently mocking the Orwellian overtones of typical corporate-ese, here, but from experience I do believe that a love of language learning can be nurtured by a careful system of parental incentives.
My kids love learning Mandarin Chinese, and I love helping them along on their language learning journey. I believe it is possible for parents to engineer passion and love of learning into their kids, as deterministic as that might seem. Incentive-based parenting and incentive-based language learning will be the topic of a future article on tigerba.com.
Before your LingoBus lesson starts, make sure your learner is not hungry or thirsty, and has gone to the bathroom. You don’t want to be burning up class time attending to basic needs, or have your learner doing an ever-more-frantic potty dance in their chair while they try and fail to learn Chinese (… yeah, been there, done that. 😊 )
How can I keep an organized record of my child’s class history with LingoBus?
LingoBus maintains a record of your child’s class history which can be viewed online. The teacher name, class type, and class date is notated in this history. However, if you are serious about tracking your learner’s progress, I recommend maintaining your own records of class history in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. The good news is that is pretty easy to import LingoBus’s class history from the LingoBus website into your spreadsheet program of choice. You can do this even if you have no programming or developer background. Check out the handy-how to article I recently wrote on how you can manage this import process yourself using easy online tools.
Where is LingoBus based?
LingoBus is headquartered in Beijing, China, but its teachers are located all over the world. Our kids have had LingoBus teachers with native-level fluency from China, Canada, and Europe.
Does LingoBus teach Traditional Chinese characters?
Being headquartered in Mainland China, LingoBus teaches using the Simplified Character set that is used in the People’s Republic of China AKA Mainland China. My personal feeling is that this shouldn’t be an impediment even if you favor Traditional characters in your teaching.
If you absolutely cannot abide the use of Simplified Characters for reasons of nationalism or identity or faith, you know exactly who you are, I respect that choice, and I’m not going to try to persuade you.
For everyone else who might be on the fence regarding Simplified vs. Traditional, you should recognize that 70% of Simplified characters are 100% identical to their Traditional counterparts. The remaining 30% of Simplified and Traditional characters that differ in appearance often strongly resemble one another to the point that they are easily guessed on first viewing by a competent reader of Hanzi. Consider the following examples:
说 說
猫 貓
会 會
On the left, we have Simplified Characters with their nod to clean Bauhaus modernism, and on the right we have the same characters rendered as the more ornate and bejeweled Traditional glyphs. Even someone Hanzi-illiterate is apt to notice the striking similarities between these characters. My first steps into Chinese literacy involved trying to read Simplified Hanzi, but literally the first time I encountered the Traditional equivalents to these Simplified glyphs, I understood exactly what I was reading. Speaking only in terms of their visual design, the differences between Simplified and Traditional glyphs tend to be overstated.
Studying Simplified Chinese is effectively studying Traditional Hanzi at the same time, and vice versa. Many people don’t seem to recognize that.
I strongly believe that children learning Mandarin Chinese should learn to fluidly read both Simplified and Traditional Characters. Traditional and Simplified characters are used by millions of people we will want and need to communicate with. Both sets are very important. Study both.
When is the best time to buy LingoBus lessons?
I would argue that if high-level Mandarin attainment for your kids is a goal, the best time for you to buy LingoBus lessons is right now. It’s easy to get hung up on the price of lessons, but the most “expensive” and irreplaceable commodity to consider here is your learner’s time and opportunity. Your kids will grow up and get very busy sooner than you can imagine. You have much less time than you think.
If you are serious about Mandarin attainment, ideally your learner can achieve conversational fluency and strong Hanzi literacy by grade 6. If they manage to do this by the time they reach middle school, your learners can seamlessly use Chinese to study higher-level disciplines: mathematics, art, debate, computer programming, and many other topics, as we are. To get to that position of language strength will require that you start teaching them in a structured and consistent way as early as they are ready to sit through structured lessons. I wouldn’t wait around for months for an idealized price for LingoBus lessons. If you have the means, pay the money and get started.
The best time to really stock up on LingoBus lessons is during their sales, which typically happen two or three times a year. Reliable times to find sales on Lingobus lessons is the time around “Singles Day” (11/11) or Black Friday (near to Thanksgiving). I have saved a lot of money over the years by buying very large packages of lessons during these sales.
Can I ask LingoBus to customize a lesson?
Short answer: not really. Longer answer: LingoBus adheres to a highly structured curriculum. It is very much “on the rails”, and does not deviate from a predetermined path. With LingoBus, kids are taught things in a certain order, at a certain speed, and in a certain way. For every LingoBus lesson, the teacher sticks to a carefully designed script.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this disciplined approach. One advantage is that there is an incredible consistency to how LingoBus teaches. One teacher can easily substitute for another, and under LingoBus’s uniform curriculum, this change will not tend to throw off either teacher or learner.
LingoBus teachers can improvise, but those improvisations will happen squarely within the framework of Lingobus’s predetermined class structures. In short, the teacher can make the material harder by asking more elaborate questions of learners, or they can make things easier by providing more support to your learner. But no matter how nicely you ask, LingoBus teachers are not going to deviate wildly from their set curriculum.
Parents looking for more free-form lessons are advised to seek out a tutor on iTalki who is open to customized lesson plans.
Is it safe to keep thousands of dollars in prepaid credit with LingoBus? I don’t want to lose my money!
There are no absolute guarantees in life, and I can’t and won’t speak for LingoBus or its future in any way. But I can tell you how I personally evaluated this risk.
Our family now has more than $7000 USD in stored credit at LingoBus. If all goes well, this credit will be consumed over the next three years. I’m somewhat cautious with money, and can often envision the worst outcomes, but I rest pretty easy with this particular investment.
Lingobus’s parent company is VIPKid. VIPKid has received hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital from investors all over the world, including the American venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. The Chinese technology firm Tencent, the maker of the famous WeChat/Wexin app, has also invested repeatedly in VIPKid/LingoBus, as have a number of other major institutional investors.
These companies and VC firms are not stupid, and they are not really interested in wasting their hundreds of millions of dollars worth of venture capital, either. Their great hope is that LingoBus will succeed wildly, grow like crazy, educate a lot of kids, and make everyone rich and happy. Venture capital firms tend to work very hard and very closely with the companies they’ve invested in to make that success happen. You, LingoBus, and these venture capitalists all have a common interest in finding success and seeing the company thrive long into the future.
Conclusion
LingoBus is a smart first choice for kids who want to learn Mandarin Chinese. Its curricula are professionally designed, its resources are extensive, and its teachers are top-notch. LingoBus teachers come to class with a clear vision for what they will teach in a given lesson, and they patiently and expertly guide kids along an exciting learning path. Over the course of years, LingoBus students slowly and surely progress towards conversational fluency and literacy.
LingoBus was the very first online Mandarin program our family signed up for, and has remained at the center of our Chinese studies. We are profoundly grateful to the LingoBus company and its teachers for giving our kids the gift of language.
If you have questions about LingoBus, feel free to leave a comment: I do read and answer them. You’re also welcome to contact me privately by e-mail at laohuba@hotmail.com. I’ll do my best to answer your questions, or point you in the right direction toward an answer. And if you’re ready to sign up for a trial lesson or buy a LingoBus package, please consider using my magic link to get you and me some free stuff.
All the best in your Mandarin language learning journey! 加油！You’ve got this!
Postscript: How could LingoBus be improved?
The following section will not be of interest to many. However, for parents pursuing higher-level Mandarin Chinese ability for their kids, it is worth thinking through what the LingoBus platform does really well, and what could be improved. This is especially true if (like us) you are not native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and don’t have family or friends nearby to help you build a language learning ecosystem. Understanding LingoBus’s present limits will help you figure out what other resources you’ll require to push your learners toward fluency and literacy.
Opportunity for improvement #1: solve for the problem of practice, and provide a paid form of practice
It often seems that LingoBus is built with the assumption that Mandarin Chinese-speaking family will be around to practice with the learner and support them. There are increasing numbers of kids coming into LingoBus with high-level fluency as a goal whose family speaks no Chinese. And some learners need more time to digest and practice what they have recently learned.
It would be very helpful if parents could schedule and pay for additional one-on-one practice sessions with a trained teacher. These practice sessions should not advance the learner’s place in the curriculum, but they should practice whatever vocabulary and grammar the student is currently studying in LingoBus.
Opportunity for improvement #2: allow parents a control mechanism in the app to order a repeat of previous lessons themselves.
It is possible to repeat lessons in LingoBus if a parent believes that a learner needs additional practice or additional support, but only through a very special effort of reaching out to customer support. Many parents don’t even realize that repeating lessons is possible. Many more parents will be consciously or unconsciously embarrassed to admit their learner needs more practice.
It is in LingoBus’ interest to make it possible for parents to order the repeat of lessons, units, or even entire levels. (For my younger, we repeated all 60 lessons of LingoBus Level 3 at our teacher’s suggestion, and that was brilliant advice.)
One of the most common reasons LingoBus may lose durable customers is out of a sense that a learner is falling behind or not making progress. By allowing parents to order the repeat of material, it removes any stigma or sense of shame about a lack of progress, and it will also enable LingoBus to sell more lessons.
Opportunity for improvement #3: institute design and brand consistency throughout the lower-level “Speaking and Reading” program.
Throughout its lower levels, LingoBus has this very nice thing going on in terms of its storytelling and brand identity. Learners are introduced to the cartoon character Dodo, Aiwen, and Beibei. Over time, stories are told in which these three core cartoon characters travel to distant places and we meet other interesting characters. Children learning through LingoBus grow to love these characters and think of them as friends. This storytelling quietly reinforces a very positive and mature message about the diversity of Chinese peoples, as we encounter the differing dress, cuisines, and habits of people in various parts of China.
Starting in Level 4, this brand identity is abruptly and inexplicably dropped for the most part. The storytelling loses its cohesion, and the artwork loses much of its charm. Both of my sons noticed this change and asked plaintively for “the old cartoons.” Even I felt something of a sense of sadness as I realized that Aiwen and BeiBei and Dodo’s future would be left completely unresolved.
Opportunity for improvement #4: Compose songs to accompany units after level 3.
LingoBus also loses its Unit-level songs in Level 4 of “Speaking and Reading”. It is a mistake to drop these songs. Songs are a very effective way to reinforce vocabulary and Hanzi character recognition. The kids learn a lot without even realizing it.
Opportunity for improvement #5: offer the option of meaningful homework and review by a professional teacher
Currently homework is implemented in the LingoBus curriculum in the following ways:
- Review of a ~three minute video associated with each lesson
- Review of an audiobook, with practice speaking exercises
- The option to practice handwriting Hanzi Chinese characters, which in 2025 arguably has relatively little to do with learning Mandarin Chinese to proficiency and just might be busywork
- Three or four flashcards per lesson and accompanying quizzes, which does not reflect the amount of vocabulary learners should be internalizing.
- Workbook exercises from a printable PDF
- At the highest units of Level 4, there are optional “projects” at the end of the sixth lesson. Students who do this work can review it in class.
Critically, none of this work is reviewed or mediated by a native-speaking teacher with the exception of the Unit 4 “projects.” It’s all on the parents to help their learners do this review, and subject to the limits of parental time and ability.
This amount of homework is insufficient to assure fluency and literacy, at least for non-heritage learners. Non-Chinese speaking families who aim for their kids to be proficient in Chinese currently must find meaningful practice opportunities outside of the LingoBus ecosystem.
LingoBus should support learners better with the option of meaningful homework and in-class review by a professional and native-speaking teacher. This will lead to better outcomes for learners, and more money for LingoBus. These forms of homework could include:
- Sentence and essay writing. Most learners would use a Pinyin-to-Hanzi / Zhuyin-to-Hanzi keyboard, which is how 99.9999999% of Chinese characters are written today by native Mandarin Chinese speakers in China, Taiwan, and the Chinese-speaking diaspora.
- Projects involving drawing, design, and accompanying use of Mandarin Chinese / Hanzi.
- Formal presentations and speeches, as well as practice at impromptu presentation. The right way to do this is to begin by asking learners to make very simple and short presentations, and gradually ask for more length, complexity, and cohesion as their confidence and ability grows. Yes, LingoBus offers some of this sort of practice in the context of its little-known Public Speaking class, but it would also be helpful if oral expression could be practiced in a more informal context.
Offering the option of meaningful homework that was reviewed in class would greatly support parents who are pushing fluency for their kids, but who lack time or ability to review the homework themselves.
Opportunity for improvement #6: Support high level learners with an advanced and open-ended curriculum through age 18
Currently LingoBus has a defined endpoint for kids who complete all of its coursework. The stated age coverage is only to age 15. It would be great if there were additional options and curriculum for advanced learners. Other online schools offer higher-level curricula. It would be helpful if LingoBus did, too.
Opportunity for improvement #7: Embrace the digital revolution in language learning by offering learning resources and exercises online, versus asking parents to print things out
Many of the supplementary learning resources associated with LingoBus like the coloring book, the workbooks, the worksheets, and the flashcards are curiously analog. They are intended to be printed out, cut out, and assembled as necessary. This is charming and quaint and evokes the rustic charms of Little House on the Prairie, but it doesn’t really reflect how many learners are using the LingoBus program now, or how people study languages in 2025. It would be nice if resources like words lists and flashcards were available in digital form, perhaps as Anki or Quizlet decks.
Our family often uses LingoBus while we’re on the road traveling, and digital learning materials would be a much better fit for on-the-go study. Analog stuff often simply doesn’t get done for lack of a printer.
Disclosures on referrals
The integrity of my reviews and recommendations on tigerba.com matter to me. I paid for every LingoBus lesson my kids have ever taken using my own money. I have not been approached by LingoBus to write this review, nor have I been compensated in any way in advance of its publication. The only reason LingoBus knows about this review in advance of its publication is because I asked them for clarification and detail on a few of their lesser-known course offerings.
Some people attempt to make a low-level business shilling various online education programs. As a website owner, you can earn referral bonuses from companies by steering readers to buy stuff. The availability of these referral bonuses is one reason that there are so many short, superficial reviews of language learning apps online — there is some money to be made.
Picking up spare change from the language learning community isn’t really my motivation for writing any of this up. What I most value through writing are the connections I make in the language learning community. Those connections will help me teach both of my children Mandarin Chinese more effectively.
That all said, there are referral links in the review above. LingoBus has a referral program, and if you purchase through the links above, LingoBus may eventually send me some money, or perhaps some free lessons for Sam方平山 and Thomas小方糖. This doesn’t cost you anything. Any money I make from LingoBus referrals will go to pay the many bills for this website. To date I have spent thousands of dollars setting up this website, buying future-looking website plug-ins, and paying for website hosting. At present, tigerba.com is a money-losing enterprise and I’m perfectly happy with that. But tigermama虎妈 tells me it would be a nice thing to offset a few of its costs.
Disclosures on AI and plagiarism
I like the process of writing in the old-fashioned way and don’t presently use any form of AI to write my articles.
From time to time I’ve heard accusations of alleged plagiarism between competitor language learning blogs. I’ve solved that potential problem by generally not reading other language learning blogs.
Avoiding other people’s writing about Chinese language learning helps me to keep my writing, my coverage, and my perspective fresh. I can write freely without worrying that I may have inadvertently borrowed someone else’s ideas, language, priorities, coverage, or point of view.
