It's a rap: Teacher finds method in music

Mandarin can be a massive challenge for people trying to pick it up as a second language, but a London teacher has introduced a novel way to teach it - by rapping in Chinese to make classes memorable and fun.

Adam Moorman, a teacher at Fortismere School in North London, said rapping makes things easy to remember, and Chinese has a good rhythm, so it is natural to combine them.

"As Chinese words are monosyllabic, and there's a very limited number of sounds in Chinese, many words rhyme with each other. If you discount tones, there are about 400 sounds in Chinese, compared with more than 10,000 in English, so it's easier to come up with rhymes in Chinese than in English," he said.