I initially chose a platform website, because there were not many language teaching institutions entering this industry at that time, and I did not have a bachelor's degree, so I did not have relevant certificates. For me, such a plain person, platform type website requirements are much more tolerant. You can think of it as a language teaching Taobao, the store is each independent teacher, the products sold are the teaching services we provide. The site offers instruction in several languages, with the popular ones being English, Spanish, French and Chinese. With the development of China's economy, the number of people learning Chinese is increasing. Now, Chinese has become the second most popular language to learn. Relatively speaking, platform websites have a lower threshold for teachers and are more open. Many platforms accept two types of teachers: professional teachers with teaching qualifications, who can customize different classes and set higher prices accordingly; The other is the oral practice without teaching qualification, the course is set for oral practice, the students will not do too much requirements on the teacher. Foreign students choose teachers according to their preferences and needs. Teachers and platforms are cooperative systems, so teachers need to establish personal brands and take responsibility for their own profits and losses. In the long run, more and more foreigners will choose to learn Chinese online. Personally, I am very optimistic about this industry. The difficulty of finding a good teacher is mentioned more than once by many foreign students I interact with. The imbalance between students who are struggling to find a good teacher and teachers who are struggling to wait for students to set the course is an obstacle to the development of online Chinese teaching industry and a problem that needs to be solved. In addition, training courses and institutions for online teachers are scarce. At present, what can be found on the Internet is mostly the training content of offline large-class courses and some certificate traini

ng. However, there is a big difference between online class and online class, and it takes quite a long time for teachers to get used to online teaching. Therefore, I hope to fill this gap through my own efforts to help more teachers who want to enter the industry and seek long-term development. Therefore, I developed some courses with Rachel, a very experienced online Chinese teacher in the industry (with over nine and a half years of teaching experience and over 10,000 hours of teaching time), hoping to build our own Chinese language learning platform and provide more and more stable teaching opportunities for our trained teachers. At present, we have helped hundreds of beginners who are interested in this industry to realize the career path of online Chinese teacher. The hardest part of doing this job is the initial downturn. I remember it was more than a month after I successfully applied on the website before I had my first student (teachers without student evaluations are not easy to get the attention of new students). There were only a few students here and there for most of the year. Sometimes there are two or three classes a day and no classes at all. At the time, I was working part-time and in a sales job I didn't really like. It was not until the second half of 2016 that my courses gradually stabilized, with an average of 15 classes sold per week. At that time, my courses were priced at 10 US dollars per class (at that time, the exchange rate of RMB to the US dollar was about 1:7), and each class took 1 hour. After a month, after deducting the platform commission fee (15%), I can make about 3,500 yuan. I told myself at that time, "If my income can steadily reach more than 5,000 yuan a month, I will quit my sales job and become an online Chinese teacher." In 2017, my goal was reached. Since then, I have raised my class fees by about 15% each year and gained more students. In the third year of this job, my monthly class fee exceeded 10,000 yuan. And then the money keeps going up. I think the biggest challenge for a new teacher is to face the first year or two of the downturn. Do you have enough reserves to support yourself? Are you patient enough to wait for the students? Are there ways to find foreign students to gain experience and improve their teaching abilities? I think the main reason I persevered was that I had a part-time job at the time, which supported me through that accumulation process.

I also enjoy being at work. Although there were fewer classes and my income was low at the beginning, I was immersed in it at that stage. At that time, online courses were still a new thing, and it was amazing to be able to make friends with people from all over the world and teach them Chinese. After becoming an online Chinese teacher, my life has changed. The biggest change should be the improvement of my oral English. From the earliest dumb English, I could not form sentences at all, to now I can communicate with foreigners naturally and fluently. If not for this job, I don't know when my English will reach this level. Although my current English level is still far from my satisfactory state, I have taken learning English as one of my hobbies and insist on studying for at least 30 minutes every day. I also found that to become a language teacher, it is not necessary to not want to learn. We need to constantly summarize language rules and analyze cultural differences. People with different mother tongues have different ways of thinking. The longer I've been in this business, the more I've become fascinated by these details that have nothing to do with making money. My class time is from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and the class schedule is different every day. I will not cancel or change the class without special circumstances, which is also a key point to stabilize the enrollment. Classes are locked in 24 hours before they start, so I do the next day's schedule the night before. Take classes, prepare lessons, read books, do yoga, take dance lessons, play the piano, learn English, write video scripts, shoot videos, cut videos, do live classes... Schedule each day tightly and fully. My long freelance life has taught me to take initiative, so self-discipline is just a process of making a plan and getting used to it.