Mandarin TempleMandarin Temple Beta Come for Knowledge. Stay for Wisdom.

For tutors

Being found in the directory

jiào xué xiāng zhǎng — “Teaching and learning grow one another”

Your public profile, the levels and skills you list, and how learners reach you.

4 min read

Not what you were looking for?

Talk to us

The tutor directory is how a learner who does not already know you can find you. Being in it needs two separate things to be true, and it shows strictly less about you than people expect — which is deliberate.

Two switches, both required

  • Verified — ours — A new tutor account starts provisional and we review it. This is a vetting step, not an automatic one.
  • Listed — yours — An explicit opt-in. Verification alone does not put you in the directory; you have to ask to be there.

Both are needed. Either one off means you are not listed, and neither affects your ability to teach — circles, assignments and tracking all work regardless.

What a visitor sees

  • Your name and avatar — As set in your profile.
  • A verified badge — The whole point of the vetting step.
  • The HSK levels you teach — So a learner can filter to someone who covers their band.
  • The skills you teach — Listening, speaking, writing, exam prep, and so on.
  • Your public circles — Links to circles you have chosen to make public. Private and unlisted ones never appear.
  • Your bio — only if you made it public — A separate switch again. An unpublished bio is not shown to anyone.

Being found

Visitors filter by HSK level, by skill, and by searching your name or public bio. Three things follow from that:

  1. Set your levels and skills accurately — They are the filters. A tutor with nothing set is invisible to everyone who narrows the list, which is most people.
  2. Make your bio public — It is the only free text in the listing and the only thing that distinguishes you from another verified name. It is also searched.
  3. Make one circle public — A visible circle gives a learner something to look at and a way in that does not require messaging a stranger.
The top of the tutor directory: a breadcrumb of Circles, Tutors, a red roundel holding a figure in a tie, the eyebrow FIND A TUTOR and the heading Verified Mandarin tutors above 导师 with the pinyin dǎoshī. Under a line saying tutors can be browsed by the HSK levels and skills they teach, and that every one carries a verified checkmark, sits a single round red avatar with the initials WT, a summary card reading 1 tutors, 0 levels, 0 skills, and a My Circles button.
The counters tally the whole directory rather than the filtered results, and they read one tutor with no levels and no skills to their name. Further down the page every HSK-level and skill chip is still rendered; picking any of them drops that one tutor and leaves "No tutors match those filters". A zero in either counter is what an unset profile looks like from the outside.

You do not need the directory

Plenty of tutors here teach learners they already had. Invite them by email, run your circle, and never appear in the directory at all — nothing about the product assumes you are listed.

The directory is a way to be discovered, not a requirement for teaching.

Common questions

Listing is a separate opt-in. Verification is our side; listing is yours, and you have to switch it on.

Continue learning

Becoming a tutorTurning on a tutor account, what changes about your workspace, and what verification means.Circles explainedThe four kinds of circle, which one you want, and what visibility actually controls.