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.