I am a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese. I have two degrees of teaching Chinese as a second language and teaching English as a second language. With my background I have more experience with some problems that non-native Chinese speakers could have. I have been teaching Chinese with non-native speakers for two years, and recently I have been teaching Chinese with little kids. I've found that before age 6, kids can quickly and correctly learn tones, and after 6 they can learn characters and strokes and better understand sentence structure. No matter what ages my students are, I like to use games and role playing to practice with them, because it's fun and applicable to real-life conversations. I like to have students practice writing and discuss the history and background of the Chinese culture, so they can understand the meaning of the Chinese characters and language in a better way. If students don't understand the history, Chinese can be hard for them to remember. I also like to focus on practicing conversations in my tutoring sessions, and it is highly emphasized in my teaching.