Our First Language Course Offering: Mandarin 1 for Business

class in session

Posted by Tina

We started off the New Year with a completely new offering:  a ten week course in Mandarin Chinese.  The course not only focused on language skills, but also offered cultural tips, especially for a business setting. Even the book that we used was very much focused on a business environment.   We partnered with Penn State York, and our participants received a Penn State certificate of completion as well as a non-degree transcript and 20 Continuing Education Units.

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Tina and our instructor,
Cherry Bearer
also known as Lài lǎoshi

The class was not easy, but we had a great group of students and a wonderful teacher!!!  What made it even more challenging was the fact that most of our participants frequently traveled to China, so at any given time, we were missing 2 or more students. Of course, those students had the advantage of total language immersion.

I have to say, personally, I found this to be a very challenging language to study. Not just because of the characters (we used pinyin to start off, which made it a bit easier), but Chinese is a tonal language, which adds just another layer of complexity.   Luckily I have a long commute, which allowed me to listen to our language CDs again, and again, and again....



Here are some useful websites our instructor shared with us:

• http://www.nciku.com/   for an online Chinese dictionary that lets you draw characters with your mouse among lots of other things
• http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/Itool/type_pinyin_with_tones.htm  this site lets you type pinyin with the tone marks
• http://www.shufawest.us/language/tonedrill.html  a good site for practicing tones
• http://pinyinpractice.com/tones.htm - pinyin practice (with tones!)
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/greetings/  Learn some common Chinese greetings

It was very impressive to see how much the class participants had learned at the end of the 10 weeks.  We had oral group presentations during our last class and it was amazing to see the progress everyone had made in such a short time.

"Graduation"