Growing Up with Chinese
Growing up with Chinese is a scheduled 100-episode series on CCTV-News, China Central Television's English channel, starting from August 2, 2010, each episode 15-min in length. It is aired from Monday to Sunday at 17:15 and 0:15 BJT. On Monday and Thursday, it airs new lessons and rebroadcast on the other days. The show teaches 3 short phrases each lesson, aiming to teach children and teenagers Chinese. The show is hosted by Charlotte MacInnis,[1] known to Chinese as Ai Hua (爱华). The dramatic sequence section of Growing up with Chinese stars Tian Yuanhao (田原皓), who portrays "Mike", a North American exchange student, Wang Haocheng (王浩丞), and Azi Guli (阿孜古丽), an Uyghur ethnic minority who speaks perfect Chinese. The cast portrays students around the age of 14 i.e. prior to High School/College and were in fact of that age at the time of filming.
In early April 2011, it was announced by CCTV-News that Growing up with Chinese would cease broadcasting as of April 10, 2011 for reasons that were not made public. Later that same month, it was announced that the show was scheduled to continue broadcasting shortly with planned releases scheduled for early May but were not released online until late June. Currently all 100 episodes can be viewed online at e.g. YouTube.