Working Mandarin for Beginners

Working Mandarin for Beginners is designed to enable English-speaking business students and professionals with no prior knowledge of Chinese to develop the basic communication skills necessary for a business trip to China or another work environment in which Mandarin is spoken.

Major features:
• Twenty-four lessons, including five review lessons
• Clear objectives for acquiring language skills, grammar, and cultural understanding
• Lessons cover important basics such as introductions and greetings, counting, reserving a hotel room, taking public transportation, and asking for directions
• Lessons cover business tasks such as coordinating and conducting meetings, selling products, and negotiating agreements—all in Chinese
• Lessons provide dialogues and vocabulary lists for reading and listening, language points, cultural points, pronunciation drills, grammar, and interactive homework
• Course concludes with a special independent project in which the student applies the language to his or her area of business study
• Pinyin is used throughout so students can start speaking Mandarin immediately
• Includes some basic lessons in the formation of Chinese characters
• Course can be combined with affordable online access to self-grading exercises (available through Quia.com, $24.95 per student for 18 months of access)

Student Book
• Includes MP3 tracks of dialogues, vocabulary lists, and audio exercises on CD
• Lessons are valuable to the classroom student as well as self-directed independent learners

Teacher's Edition
• Includes a CD-ROM with all MP3 tracks of dialogues, vocabulary, and audio exercises found on the students' disk
• CD-ROM also provides quizzes and exams (including necessary audio), approximately 300 supplementary PowerPoint slides for classroom use, and creative guidance for conversation practice, mini-immersion, and skit

Online teaching features at Quia.com
• Instructor-managed class activities and exercises
• Monitoring of student progress
• Customized grading options online
• Students can complete exercises online, submit their answers electronically to their instructor, and receive automatic feedback
• Teachers can also use Quia templates to build their own exercises or use exercises developed by other instructors to provide added help for students
• Motivated self-directed learners can also access the self-grading online exercises at Quia.com (no instructor feedback will be provided)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Student's Edition Textbook/MP3 CD (Mac and PC)
• CD drive on a computer or conventional CD player with MP3 capability
• MP3 player, such as iTunes, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player
• Speakers

Teacher's Edition Textbook/CD-ROM
Mac and PC
• CD drive on a computer
• MP3 player, such as iTunes, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player
• speakers
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (available as a free download from http:///www.adobe.com)
PC
• Windows XP
• Microsoft Office 2000 or higher with Service Pack 3 installed (Word and PowerPoint are needed to view and edit some files)
• Or, to view the PowerPoints only, download Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2003 or higher (free from http://www.microsoft.com)
• Fonts for PowerPoints: Arial Unicode and Simsun, which are included in all editions of Office 2000/XP/2003
Mac
• Microsoft Word, version Office 2004 or higher
• Microsoft PowerPoint, version Office 2004 or higher (Word and PowerPoint are needed to view and edit some files); or view the PowerPoints as PDFs
• Fonts for PowerPoints: Arial and Simsun, which are included in Office 2004 and higher

Interactive Exercises on Quia (Mac and PC)
• Computer with Internet access, preferably a high-speed connection
• Java-enabled browser: Internet Explorer 5 or higher, or any version of Firefox or Safari
• The program QuickTime (available as a free download from http://www.quicktime.com)
• Microphone to record answers or responses