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

Yi Zhou is a lecturer in the Asian Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

M. Lynne Gerber is the executive director of the Center for International Business Education and Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.