'Sexy' Mandarin language school slammed by Chinese feminists "If you go the textbook way with all these Chinese characters it just makes you intimidated," said the Toyko-born model and designer. If you start with the colloquial way ... or sexy clips it is a different story. Would-be teachers are asked to submit a full-body photo, as well as any relevant modelling or teaching experience Mick Gleissner, the Hong Kong-based filmmaker who produces the videos, said he hoped to inspire foreigners facing "the Herculean task of learning Chinese." Chinese is intimidating. You look at the characters, the strange melody of sounds. And then you watch a video like this and it's kind of ridiculous but it's also fun," said Gleissner, originally from Regensburg, Germany. The fun aspect I think is what is very much missing in the existing approaches to language education. If you want to learn to play the piano and you try to play Chopin of course you are going to give up. But if you see a kid trying to play kid's songs ... you'll say, 'Hey that's kind of easy and fun.' The official language of the People's Republic of China, Mandarin, or Putonghua, is said to have nearly 900m native speakers and up to 1.4bn speakers worldwide. China's ongoing economic boom means it is studied in an increasing number of classrooms across the globe. Kaoru Kikuchi, the University of Nottingham architecture graduate behind the site, said the project aimed to make Mandarin more accessible I was blown away when I visited some of my friends in LA and found that their kids are learning Mandarin. It's a cool language because China is now becoming cool," said Mr Gleissner. Since 2004 Beijing has been promoting Chinese language and culture overseas, building a global network of over 350 Confucius Institutes. In 2009 Xu Lin, head of the Confucius Institute Headquarters told Reuters around 40m foreigners were learning Chinese. But Xu expressed frustration at how tuition and learning levels remained "very weak" compared to English, French or Spanish. Users of Youku, China's answer to YouTube, joked that SexyMandarin.com might help change this. "The Americans are so happy learning Chinese," beamed one, using the name Guo Shibo. We would not go through so much pain if we learnt English the same way. A user on the video website Ku6 wrote: "So eye-catching and heart-throbbing. No wonder they can learn it well! Others are less impressed. Annie Chan, chairwoman of Hong Kong's Association for the Advancement of Feminism, told one newspaper SexyMandarin.com "exoticised" Chinese women. Sue-Mei Thompson, executive director of Hong Kong's Women's Foundation, told the China Daily newspaper her group was "vehemently opposed to gender stereotyping, especially anything that objectifies women as sex objects." "Sexy Mandarin looks oddly dated," she added. Wu Yue, a teacher from Beijing's Mandarin Connection school, said the site's teaching-style was "just about calling attention." "It is very entertaining, and might be good for marketing and promotion, but [it is] not good for serious language learning," she said. Students would get easily distracted during a class featuring sexual content. Mr Gleissner said the website's "viral" success was a sign that global attentions were shifting east. When I grew up ... the thing that was your goal if you got rich and successful [was that] you could move to the US. Not so anymore. If you talk to young people today they say, 'Forget the US, there's China, there's India, there are all these emerging markets.'