Zhu Beiqi, born in 1995, always has a smile on her face, which has made her many overseas friends.
In 2017, when she was a student at Zhijiang College of Zhejiang University of Technology, she volunteered to teach Chinese at an international school in North Carolina, the U.S. During her stay in the United States, she lived with a local family who loved the Chinese culture. Zhu became a Chinese tutor to two of their children who were learning Chinese from an early age.
The experience inspired her to create a Chinese-language teaching platform. After returning to China, Zhu and several classmates raised funds, rented servers, and found venues. Then in an office of more than 10 square meters in the university start-up park, Nomi Chinese Online Platform was launched.
In 2018, thanks to their efforts, the platform has attracted many students and a number of teachers of good level. But Zhu soon found some issues.
The first is time difference. Nomi's Chinese classes usually take place in the morning, while it is already evening in the United States. The teachers in China are full of energy while the students in the United States are already dozing off. Therefore, teachers often start classes at five or six in the morning for that students can study better.
Secondly, teaching is also complicated by the diverse age, cultural and religious backgrounds of students. Nomi Platform adopts the mode of immersion teaching, and teachers use only Chinese in class. However, due to students' different Chinese level and cultural background, each student's textbook often needs to be customized.
Founded only 3 years ago, this Chinese teaching platform now has more than 100 teachers and nearly 10,000 students. Since COVID-19, the platform has also provided thousands of free courses to overseas students through partnerships with international schools overseas.
Over the past few years, Nomi Platform has not only built a virtual classroom for many overseas students to learn to speak Chinese and write Chinese characters, but also a bridge for communication, allowing more and more foreign families to better understand the Chinese culture.
By Dong Na