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Working Mandarin for Beginners is designed to enable English-speaking business students and professionals with no prior knowledge of Chinese to develop the basic communication skills necessary for a business trip to China or another work environment in which Mandarin is spoken. Major features: - Twenty-four lessons, including five review lessons - Clear objectives for acquiring language skills, grammar, and cultural understanding - Lessons cover important basics such as introductions and greetings, counting, reserving a hotel room, taking public transportation, and asking for directions - Lessons cover business tasks such as coordinating and conducting meetings, selling products, and negotiating agreements--all in Chinese - Lessons provide dialogues and vocabulary lists for reading and listening, language points, cultural points, pronunciation drills, grammar, and interactive homework - Course concludes with a special independent project in which the student applies the language to his or her area of business study - Pinyin is used throughout so students can start speaking Mandarin immediately - Includes some basic lessons in the formation of Chinese characters - Course can be combined with affordable online access to self-grading exercises (available through Quia.com, $24.95 per student for 18 months of access) Student Book - Includes MP3 tracks of dialogues, vocabulary lists, and audio exercises on CD - Lessons are valuable to the classroom student as well as self-directed independent learners Teacher's Edition - Includes a CD-ROM with all MP3 tracks of dialogues, vocabulary, and audio exercises found on the students' disk - CD-ROM also provides quizzes and exams (including necessary audio), approximately 300 supplementary PowerPoint slides for classroom use, and creative guidance for conversation practice, mini-immersion, and skit Online teaching features at Quia.com - Instructor-managed class activities and exercises - Monitoring of student progress - Customized grading options online - Students can complete exercises online, submit their answers electronically to their instructor, and receive automatic feedback - Teachers can also use Quia templates to build their own exercises or use exercises developed by other instructors to provide added help for students - Motivated self-directed learners can also access the self-grading online exercises at Quia.com (no instructor feedback will be provided) SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Student's Edition Textbook/MP3 CD (Mac and PC) - CD drive on a computer or conventional CD player with MP3 capability - MP3 player, such as iTunes, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player - Speakers Teacher's Edition Textbook/CD-ROM Mac and PC - CD drive on a computer - MP3 player, such as iTunes, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player - speakers - Adobe Acrobat Reader (available as a free download from http: ///www.adobe.com) PC - Windows XP - Microsoft Office 2000 or higher with Service Pack 3 installed (Word and PowerPoint are needed to view and edit some files) - Or, to view the PowerPoints only, download Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2003 or higher (free from http: //www.microsoft.com) - Fonts for PowerPoints: Arial Unicode and Simsun, which are included in all editions of Office 2000/XP/2003 Mac - Microsoft Word, version Office 2004 or higher - Microsoft PowerPoint, version Office 2004 or higher (Word and PowerPoint are needed to view and edit some files); or view the PowerPoints as PDFs - Fonts for PowerPoints: Arial and Simsun, which are included in Office 2004 and higher Interactive Exercises on Quia (Mac and PC) - Computer with Internet access, preferably a high-speed connection - Java-enabled browser: Internet Explorer 5 or higher, or any version of Firefox or Safari - The program QuickTime (available as a free download from http: //www.quicktime.com) - Microphone to record answers or res