Yingshi Helsby

I can thoroughly recommend Yingshi as an excellent teacher. I have been studying Chinese with her since 2019. She guided me through GCSE in 2022 and I am working towards A-level soon. As an adult student with a busy full-time job, I find Yingshi to be patient and adaptable when I have little time for study, but extremely helpful and motivational when I do. She can be demanding, especially on pronunciation and certain aspects of grammar, but I regard this as a strength. Her lessons are full of conversational practice and good humour, but she will also expect effort to be made in the learning of characters and the practice of sentence-writing. I have found her to be an ideal coach for my needs, but I know she also guides many children and young people through to successful GCSE, A-level and HSK results. Thoroughly recommended!

I had been learning Chinese on and off with books for years, but needed help — especially with formal Beijing pronunciation and real writing/conversation practice. I contacted YingShi at Cheltenham Mandarin School and have now been studying successfully with her for several years. She knows both simplified and traditional Chinese writing systems and uses a clear, structured methodology where Pinyin is just a tool to learn pronunciation—not a substitute for writing proper Chinese. She is flexible, adapts each lesson to my needs, and teaches both online and in-person. Under her guidance I passed HSK3 language examination and am now working towards HSK4. I warmly recommend YingShi for her excellent teaching, kindness, patience, and the quality of her pronunciation. Her deep knowledge of Chinese culture also adds valuable context and avoids cultural misunderstandings. Chinese is a fascinating and beautiful language, and learning with YingShi is both fun and motivating.