For an absolute beginner who wants to learn Mandarin, whether for doing business or for personal enrichment, attending a Mandarin class is the quickest and most effective way to acquire basic Mandarin speaking and writing skills. Look for Mandarin class of small class size of less than 10 students, led by experienced native-speaking teacher. Standard Mandarin class typically runs for 2 to 3 hours a session spanning over 10 sessions.
Standard Class Program Outline
Standard Mandarin Class integrates Mandarin speaking, listening, reading and writing with high degree of student interaction and conversation for practice. Class instructions are conducted in the form of lectures, oral drills, conversations, discussions, presentations, classroom exercises, homework and quizzes. Students are recommended to purchase textbooks on Chinese character text, Chinese character workbook with Notes & Exercises.
Mandarin class are extended over several learning levels with progressive goals. Upon completion of each level, students will have to achieve the respective goals on Mandarin listening, reading, speaking and writing. Upon successful completion of the Mandarin class, students will be able to use the language both in speaking and reading with greater ease; to read and write characters with greater confidence.
Mandarin Speaking Skills
In a Mandarin class, students will be taught to pronounce Mandarin correctly with tones. To strengthen pronunciation skills, students must also learn basic radicals in characters and understand stroke order in writing Chinese characters. They must regularly practice on tones, initials and finals.
To being with, speaking skills will start with phone conversations, classroom situations, weekend social activities with emphasis on time, place and social manners. At next level students will learn to narrate with ease and confidence; to negotiate a bargain when shop; to discuss about everyday life and to participate in ease on conversations in routine and social situations. By the end of Mandarin class, students will be able to actively participate in most informal and limited formal conversations related to work, school, home or leisure activities. Students can expect to converse with accuracy, clarity, and precision and to convey their intents without misrepresentation or confusion.
Mandarin Writing Skills
Chinese writing has no alphabetical order therefore it is difficult to remember the ideographs through memorization, since there are no sequential links connecting them. There are 214 elementary pictographs that form the basis of Chinese writing. These pictographs originated literally from pictures drawn of objects, animals, phenomena of nature etc. These pictures have changed over the years but many can be identified from their original representations. These pictographs evolved over the centuries of Chinese civilization into symbols that stand for abstract ideas. Thus simple pictographs evolved further into ideographs. Gradually ideographs were combined with a kind of phonetic script to make new words.
The Chinese language is constantly evolving and there is an infinite number of words that can emerge through the combinations of the 214 elementary pictographs called ‘Chinese radicals’. Alternatively a new word can be formed by combining two or more radicals. And this is only the beginning. In a Mandarin class students will be taught how to write the commonly used Chinese radicals which form the basis of Chinese writing. By mastering these radicals students will learn other ideographs more easily and how to use a Chinese-English dictionary more quickly. The common approach is to teach writing reading and conversing together for accelerated learning.
