Working Mandarin for Beginners: , Student's Edition [With CD (Audio)]

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.