Ming Yuan Chinese

Being a parent and former student, I think I can give a fairly honest review.
Most kids hate going to school. Having to go on a Sunday morning from 9:30 — 12:30 really makes it worse. If the person attending doesn’t want to be there, it’s hard to educate teach them about anything in 3 hours a week. Sure, if the parents work with them at home, it improves the learning curve. There are families there who aren’t even Chinese and do what it takes for the child to master the language. For example, a little Mexican boy learned to speak beautiful Mandarin from attending Ming Yuan but he also had a private tutor working with him. Most importantly, HE wanted to learn AND the parents enabled it. You can drag a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink. Same with reluctant children.
I enrolled for a few years. at first I sat with children in their regular classes, then they started an adult class. Unfortunately, not enough adults committed to going on Sundays so that fell apart. Some adults continued in the children’s classes but I decided to take a break and just learn from my son’s homework assignments.
If your child does well on a test, it’s because the teacher spends an hour reviewing almost everything on the test so the students can do well and advance to the next level. I held some of my children back so that they would have a solid foundation going forward. What’s the point of learning new stuff when you don’t even know the basics?
If you want your child to learn how to speak, read, and write Mandarin (no longer offers Cantonese classes), don’t expect much if the kid is unwilling to pay attention and learn. If your child wants to learn, then this is a really cheap option. Some parents just send their kids so they can have 3 hours to go grocery shopping time.

Another psycho place for parents to send their kids to after school. This is the place where the kid (me) who gets bullied becomes the bully. Was it fun? I’m not gonna lie, it was. I do feel bad about it now but whateya gonna do? I can’t remember any of the teachers name but I remember exactly what they look like. Bunch of tough guys. Those guys were actually hilarious. One of the top rank people, her brother was a pretty cool guy. Reminded me a lot of my uncle. Dude had a bad ass leather jacket, smoked a bunch of cigarettes, and barely smiled.
The female teachers here were a bitch! There was one young hot tall lookin teacher. She was alright. Other than that, everyone here sucked! Me and my friend vandalized P. S 13 so bad that the Principal forced Ming Yuan to hold all their after school study programs in the cafeteria. I was a horrible kid when I came here. Writing this review about them kinda makes me miss them. Good times… way better than Kumon but still deserve 1 star because of its lousy school bus service. I lived on the other side of Queens Blvd, I should be the first person to drop off but I was always last!

It is in the Asian parents’ manual: send your children to Chinese school. Unfortunately neither my brother nor I learned anything here in 4 years. Part of this is because they teach entirely in Mandarin, assuming you only need to learn to write it, but unlike most of the other kids I did not speak much Mandarin at home and therefore spent most classes confused. The other part is just that the lesson plans are not thought out at all and the teachers aren’t particularly skilled.
Ming Yuan also offered some test prep classes, where I was far ahead of everyone in my class. The praise from the instructors (white people they hired from NYC public schools, I think) was nice for my self esteem, but I still learned nothing.
Side story: One of the teachers, a middle-​aged man, kept asking the girls in my all-​Asian class about our «traditions» and whether our names were «ethnic» (one of the girls was named Lily. «Ethnic,» WTF?). It was uncomfortable more than once.
Save your money, and perhaps your kids’ dignity too.