A Language Programme for Teenagers

    Welcome to Teenagers Abroad! We invite you to join us on an amazing journey of language learning.

Our Courses

    Regardless of your choice of course, you'll develop your language ability both quickly and effectively.

Our Standard Course guarantees a significant increase in your confidence in a foreign language, with focused teaching in all 4 skill areas—-speaking, listening, reading and writing.

    Our Intensive Course builds on our Standard Course, with 10 additional lessons per week, guaranteeing the fastest possible language learning (see table below).

    Evaluation

    Students are placed into classes according to their current language skills. The majority of them take on online language test before starting their programme. However, if this is not available, students sit the exam on the first Monday of their course.

    Learning materials are provided to students throughout their course, and there will never be more than 15 participants in each class.

Arrivals and Transfer

    Our programme offers the full package—students are taken good care of from the start through to the very end. They are collected from the airport upon arrival and brought to their accommodation in comfort. We require the student's full details at least 4 weeks in advance.

    Meals/Allergies (过敏) /Special Dietary Requirements

    Students are provided with breakfast, dinner and either a cooked or packed lunch (which consists of a sandwich, a drink and a dessert). Snacks outside of mealtimes may be purchased by the student individually.

    We ask that you let us know of any allergies or dietary requirements as well as information about any medicines you take. Depending on the type of allergies and/or dietary requirements, an extra charge may be made for providing special food.

    With the coming of winter, it's the perfect time to get out of town and escape the seasonal mood（心情）disorder. Here are vacation ideas to adopt now.

    Costa Rica

    Costa Rica, located in the Valle del General, is well-known for its coffee, pineapples and sugar cane plantations as well as its rich forests. What's more, you can enjoy horseback riding, spend afternoons at the spa or tour a nearby wildlife shelter to look out for colorful birds, sloths and other animals.

    Los Cabos, Mexico

    If you love wine, travel to Los Cabos, a beautiful vacation destination at the southern edge of the Baja Peninsula. During your getaway, you can enjoy special wine tastings and dinner cooked by Los Cabos's Michelin-starred chef. There are wild-viewing opportunities, too. From December through May, you can spot whales, manta rays and more wildlife.

    Petit St Vincent, the Grenadines

    This private Caribbean island was spared（使幸免）the anger of hurricanes Irma and Maria. What's more, the whole island is only 115 acres and has 22 cottages（小屋）. Each cottage is located in a quiet place, and you can expect to unplug and recharge phones with no wireless connections, television or telephones in the cottage. Even better, you can spend your days admiring fascinating marine（海洋的）life at the Jean-Michel Cousteau Diving Caribbean center.

    The Exumas, Bahamas

    On Fowl Cay's 50-acre private island, you can enjoy a carefree escape. Days can be spent fishing, boating and diving before wandering along white sands. The resort features large one, two-and three-bedroom houses. Best of all, if you're planning a group getaway or multigenerational trip, you rent the entire island for a unique island escape.

    My children are perfect. All four of them. Perfect and beautiful and clever. I bet yours are, too. Except, of course, they are not. In reality, my children and yours are likely to be reasonably average in terms of looks, behavior, intelligence and charm. That's why it is called average. Your belief in your child being special is more probably a biological thing than a fact.

    A loved one, particularly a loved child, is edited as we observe them. Other people's children are spoiled; ours are spirited. Theirs are naughty; ours are confident.

    This is all natural and even touching when not taken too far. However, it is one thing feeding this idea to ourselves but feeding it to our children may be a little less desirable. We have the idea that — unlike my parents' generation — we should build our children's self-respect as high as we can. Therefore, their random scribble (胡写乱画) is up there with Picasso, their C-minus is an unfortunate oversight on the part of the teacher, and the fact that no one wants to be friends with them is because they are particularly clever or sensitive.

    Children see through this kind of thing very quickly and ignore their parents' praises as a matter of course. As they grow up, they sense that the wider world judges them differently. This leads to a – hopefully gentle – cynicism (猜忌) about anything their parents tell them about their achievements. Perhaps that is OK — but I'm not sure if it is good for them to have the parental praise so overlooked.

    If parents were a little harsher sometimes, this could have two positive effects — first, when praise came, it would be more likely to be believed and, second, it would fit in rather more accurately with the picture of reality that the child is forming in their heads.

    A lot of pressure is put on children who are told they are beautiful, special and perfect. Because then, where is there to go? Only downwards. They become too much aware of their status in your eyes, and a danger must be that they fear failing you. To be over-praised by your parents is the counter side of being criticized all the time. Both can have negative consequences.

    It is important to give your children the freedom to be flawed (缺点) — to know that it's OK to be imperfect, and that, in fact, we often love people for their flaws — perfect people (whom we can only imagine, as they do not exist) are easy to respect, but hard to love.

    Now I am nearly 60, my main insight is that I am much less special than I once believed. This knowledge has actually been helpful in leading a more well-balanced life.

    I certainly wouldn't like to go back to attitudes that my parents, particularly my father, held, that to praise the child was to "spoil them" or make them bigheaded. However, the history of families is like the history of everything else — the story of overreactions. We praise our children to the skies, partly because we think it makes them feel good, but also because it makes us feel good. And perhaps it is more the latter than the former.

    Too much love can be as big a burden as a shortage of it. My advice is to limit your praise. Then every piece of praise will count, rather than being just ignored.

    I started reading Shakespeare when I was nine, after my grandfather, an actor, sent me a copy of Romeo and Juliet. The story and the language attracted me. I found out about Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand (SGCNZ) and started volunteering for them when I was about 10. When I was 13, I managed to run a film project with SGCNZ.

    I'm home-educated and a part-time correspondence student (函授生) as well. We have a drama group made up of quite a few people who are also home-educated .I've also joined Wellington Young Actors, a youth theatre company. There are many similarities and differences between being home-educated and attending a five-day programme. I love hearing other students' reactions when meeting them and share my different ways of experiencing the world with them. While explaining the way I learn can be a challenge, I love helping people to understand there isn't just one way of learning.

    Being home-educated has offered me the freedom to have an individualized education and to pursue my passions. My education has always been about making those focuses but I do lots of the same things as people who attend five-day programs do. Shakespeare is a great approach to lots of things around English, history and the arts. I think something you learn when you perform is connection. You have to have a connection with your fellow actors, with the audience and with Shakespeare. I learn this from actually being on stage and from taking part in different Shakespeare festival programs.

    I believe it's the emotion in Shakespeare that makes it relevant today. You can be reading something that was written 400 years ago and be able to see parts of your life in the work as it shows you how to understand the world and explore a lot of different ideas.

    Although the idea of "zero emission net carbon-positive, sustainable (可持续)" development was promoted worldwide, most cities are at a loss what to do or even some have objected to it. But in Liuzhou, a city in southern China, attitudes could not be more different.

    The Liuzhou Municipality Urban Planning Bureau has signed up Italian architect Stefano Boeri, the father of the forest city movement, to build a self-contained community for up to 30, 000 people. He is the go-to man for such projects thanks to the success of his "vertical forests", two residential (住宅的) towers. Completed in 2014, they remove up to 17.5 tons of soot (煤烟) from the air each year, and a year later one of them was named Best Tall Building Worldwide.

    The Liuzhou project is a much more ambitious undertaking, however. Its homes, hospitals, hotels, schools and offices will be built on a 340-acre site in what Boeri calls the first attempt to create an "urban environment that is really trying to find a balance with nature". Its 100 species of plant life are expected to absorb almost 10, 000 tons of carbon dioxide and 57 tons of pollutants per year, while at the same time producing 900 tons of life-giving oxygen.

    Although the architects haven't published the cost of the forest city, the Milan towers cost only five percent more than traditional skyscrapers.

    The construction of his forest city at Liuzhou is set to begin in 2020, and there is still a great deal of planning and research required before a projected completion date can be set. However, Boeri remains optimistic about the project and has confidence in the soundness of his vision: "I really think that bringing forests into the city is a way to deal with global warming."

After releasing a short video on April 27 about planting and cooking peas, Chinese food blogger Li Ziqi witnessed her followers on YouTube go beyond 10 million.

This puts Li, who shot to fame with short videos recording her traditional and peaceful lifestyle in China's countryside, among the ranks of the most popular Chinese-language content creators on the platform.

"It's really surprising. I didn't expect such a wide response," Li told Xinhua in an interview, noting she was surprised by how foreign fans were taken with her works. "What I present is just a lifestyle I've long followed and appreciated," she said. "Maybe it's also what many other people have valued."

Li's YouTube videos center on her life with her grandmother in the rural parts of Sichuan Province. In the videos, Li, often dressed in graceful traditional dresses, rises at sunrise, rests at sunset, plants seeds and harvests flowers, cooks Chinese dishes and crafts bamboo furniture. Unlike many other food bloggers, Li's videos set China's countryside as the stage and start with how the foods are planted and harvested on the farm. She rarely speaks in the process.

Li's overseas followers have praised her videos for showing the amazingly charming, simple and beautiful side of China's rural life, but back home, there have long been debates on whether her presentation is unrealistically poetic.

In response, Li, who was raised in the countryside, said she never needs special arrangements when shooting a video about rural life as "everything is in my mind." "In the countryside, planting flowers, vegetables and trees is not difficult. There are tough elements of rural life of course, but I didn't put them in my videos," Li said. "Most people today are facing much stress in work and life, so I hope they can feel relieved and relaxed when watching my videos."