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Chinese Course -
Mandarin Express Basic Level A

Course Aims

  • Acquire important words and structures through theme based learning
  • Practice conversations in Mandarin about work and life
  • Develop Mandarin listening abilities with more elaborate Chinese texts

Course Description

This Mandarin Chinese course is designed for non-Chinese speakers, who have had around 60 - 100 hours of Mandarin lessons and who can carry on conversations in Mandarin on many social occasions. This course will bring them adequate vocabularies and structures, and take their communication abilities in Chinese to a substantial level.

Course Materials

Course Duration

32 class hours

How Does It Work

Mandarin Express Basic Level A focuses on listening and speaking Mandarin, and on developing students’ overall Chinese comprehension. The learning medium of this course is pinyin. Students are not required to study any Chinese characters. As the sentence structures remain short and simple, pinyin continues to be a viable solution to rapidly develop students’ Chinese conversational abilities.

This Chinese course provides important and highly relevant words and structures around ten topics, including daily work schedule, music, ordering in a Chinese restaurant, and so on. 

There are many fun and stimulating class activities, which aim to train students conversational abilities in Chinese and their story telling skills. 

To improve students’ overall Chinese comprehension, short and interesting readings are incorporated into the second half of the course.  

To improve students’ listening abilities, when the content is continued to be highly controlled, the speaking speed is brought closer to native-speakers’. Also, 50% of exercises in the Work Book are listening exercises, each targeting a specific area, bringing students attention to words, sentences or paragraphs respectively.

Evaluation of Progress

A review chapter is in place for every five chapters. This is where learnings are consolidated and assessed. How well students complete the exercises in these review chapters demonstrate their progress.

Study Modes


Other Related Chinese Courses


Mandarin course

Mandarin Express Intro Level B

Mandarin course

Mandarin Express Basic Level B

Chinese writing course

Chinese Reading and Writing 3