Mandarin Chinese for complete beginners

Course details

This Mandarin Chinese for complete beginners course is designed for complete beginners who are travelling to China.

The focus is on oral communication (oral and aural skills) and

the students will cover the following practical "survival skills":

• Greetings – Introducing yourself, your friends and your family
• Talking about yourself, your job, tastes and hobbies
• Travelling
• Booking a hotel and checking in
• Booking a table – Eating and drinking out
• Asking for and understanding directions
• Going shopping
• Complaining and apologising
• Elements of cultural awareness

Course Objectives

• This is a summary of the objectives for this Mandarin Chinese course for complete beginners.

Sociolinguistic Appropriateness

• To be able to establish basic social contact by using the simplest everyday polite forms of greetings, farewells, introductions, saying please, thank you, sorry etc.

Listening Comprehension (LC)

• To be able to follow speech that is very slow and carefully articulated, with long pauses for him/her to assimilate meaning.

Reading Comprehension (RC)

• To be able to understand very short, simple texts a single phrase at a time, picking up familiar names, words and basic phrases and rereading as required.

Spoken Interaction (SI)

• To be able to interact in a simple way but communication is totally dependent on repetition at a slower rate of speech, rephrasing and repair.

Spoken Production (SP)

• To be able to produce simple mainly isolated phrases about people and places.

Written Interaction (WI)

• To be able to ask for or pass on personal details in written form.

Written Production (WP)

• To be able to write simple phrases and sentences about themselves and imaginary people, where they live and what they do.