Chinese Mandarin Lower Intermediate (part 3)

In the final module, part 3, you’ll learn to experience the best of daily life in China: food, shopping and sightseeing. You’ll be able to ask questions in restaurants, give recommendations to others and to write down your favourite recipe.

You’ll also be able to describe the natural beauty of places you visit and write about the scenery. To enable this, we’ll teach you how to use adverbs, adjectives and descriptive information in speaking and writing.

Who is it for?

You’ll need to have some prior learning to join this course – around 160 hours of formal study. You may have studied with another provider or recently completed part 2 of our lower intermediate syllabus. The eligibility section has more detail.

Timetable

This course takes place one evening a week at 18:30 for 10 weeks.

Benefits

• Get the most out of travelling in China or have more in-depth conversations with relatives
• We teach is small group sizes with plenty of one-to-one support
• Focuses on improving speaking and writing skills and applying learning to real scenarios.

By the end of this course, you will be able to

• ask and answer questions about different dishes
• order food at a restaurant
• ask for and give recommendations
• write a recipe
• bargain with sellers and ask for suggestions
• write about a shopping experience
• talk about a place of natural beauty through comparison
• write about the scenery of a place
• report a daily event with information and take questions
• use adverbs, adjectives and descriptive information in speaking and writing
• incorporate more connectives in speaking and writing.

Grammatical structures

• noun phrases with de
• give instructions using imperatives
• bǎ sentences
• duplication of verbs
• terms yuè and yuè
• notional passive
• express result of an action with dào
• express percentages using bǎi fēn zhī
• sentence pattern chúle, yǐwài, há

You will be awarded an official City, University of London certificate on completion of the course if you attend over 70 per cent of the classes. The course is not formally accredited.

Your tutor will monitor your progress and give regular feedback, based on your homework and your involvement in class.

Teaching

Our functional approach is designed to develop the four key skills - listening, speaking, reading and writing. We teach through real world contexts, so you can apply what you learn in daily life. You’ll participate in role-plays and tackle language tasks in pairs, as well as learning directly with your tutor.

There is an element of e-learning, which includes using audio clips and Moodle - our learning platform where you’ll find lesson content and course material.

You’ll need around 160 hours of prior learning. You may have studied part 2 of the lower intermediate course in January.

We’d like you to have a solid grasp of Pinyin, understand rules on Chinese character formation and be able to write basic characters.

You should already be able to:

• make purchases
• buy tickets and book a hotel room
• make phone calls and carry out small social tasks
• use reflexive verbs
• use prepositions and basic forms of tenses.

English requirements

You will need a good level of spoken and written English to enrol on this course.