Pimsleur - Chinese (Mandarin)

What You’ll Learn
Builds upon skills taught in Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese Levels 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The thirty 30-minute lessons, plus pinyin and select hànzì characters reading practice, will enable you to speak and understand Mandarin with near fluency and with a broad range of conversational skills. In Level 5, the pace and conversation move quite rapidly, accelerating exposure to new vocabulary and structures, approaching native speed and comprehension. You’ll learn to speak more in-depth about your personal life and emotional state, and be able to create complex sentences using a mix of tenses and moods.

Some of the topics covered in Level 5:
• Travel: exploring the vast and richly varied country of China, discussing the various ethnic groups and cultures found from region to region, buying tickets to tourist attractions, taking family vacations, speaking with a travel agent
• Food and drink: restaurants, street vendors, favorite dishes, delicious drinks, discussing differences between Chinese and American diets.
• History: learning about important people and places, uncovering famous popular locations, discovering China's ancient past
• The environment: weather, climate change, environmental protection, wetlands
• Communication: getting in touch, sending text messages
• Work: discussing meetings, modern jobs, attending conferences, giving speeches
• Family life and relationships: family traditions, children and grandchildren, extended family members, birthdays, retirement, pets, grandparents and family history
• Health and wellness: exercising, relaxing, visiting a Chinese medical doctor, taking Chinese medicine, paying attention to one's vitality

Reading lessons introduce reading select hànzì, the characters used in the Chinese writing system. These lessons are designed to deepen your memory and understanding of learned vocabulary, as well as to begin the work of connecting the words and phrases that you have learned to the hànzì characters.

Learning the sound of each letter alone and in culturally distinct combinations allows your brain to process what you’re hearing in the audio lessons from a new and different perspective. It’s a powerful combination that makes Pimsleur different from every other method on the market.

The Mandarin Chinese Language
Over one billion people speak Chinese. The two most common dialects are Mandarin and Cantonese. They are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin is the official language in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. The Mandarin dialect is used in most Chinese schools, and in most TV programs, movies, and radio stations throughout the country, even in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), where people speak Cantonese in their daily lives. Mandarin is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.