This is a great place to learn Mandarin, they only hire full-time teachers, they are very serious about teaching Mandarin!

www.thatsmandarin.com/

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If you intend on staying in Beijing for a few months, try learning Mandarin at the Hutong School. It is situated in a beautiful courtyard in the middle of a hutong area. They give you all sorts of support, have apartments to stay in, organise trips, it's a great way to live in Beijing!

www.hutong-school.com

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It's a phone translation service that makes travelling in China much easier. You sign up online for a certain number of minutes and then add credit when you run out. All you need is a mobile phone, which you can pass to anyone you need to speak to and they can interpret what you want to say. Best part is it runs 24 hours a day so it can be really useful when it's 3am and you've realised you've lost the address of the hotel you're staying in.

Using it with international roaming can be a bit pricey (as you're using a UK network's roaming rates) so I'd recommend getting a Chinese SIM card which means it's a local-rate call from anywhere in the country.

Last time I checked they were about to introduce a SIM card delivery service but might be worth checking first. We bought our SIM cards at Beijing airport.

www.chinaonecall.com

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