Chinese Mandarin Beginners - Level 1

Learn to communicate in the world’s most widely used language with our Chinese Mandarin Beginner’s course.

You’ll start by learning key phrases to introduce yourself, greet others and talk about your daily routine. You’ll be introduced to the phonetic system, Pinyin, and develop an understanding of simple sentence structures and word orders.

As the Chinese language course progresses and your confidence grows, you’ll learn to discuss the weather, describe the seasons and shop for gifts as you practise new and more complex grammatical structures.

Who is it for?

This course is ideal if you have never studied Chinese before.

Timetable

The full beginners course includes 72 hours of online learning and is taught across six modules.

Benefits

• Delivered by a qualified and native Mandarin Chinese speaker
• Interactive and varied learning techniques
• Awarded a City St George’s, University of London certificate.

Throughout the year, you’ll learn to

• talk about countries, nationalities and people
• talk about jobs and occupations
• count numerals
• respond to comments and pay compliments
• talk about dates and days
• discuss your daily routine
• talk about family and ask about someone's family
• discuss your job and workplace
• discuss schooling
• talk about weekly plans
• make an enquiry
• discuss your favourite seasons
• ask for directions
• ask and tell prices and currencies
• buy food
• give suggestions for buying gifts.

Grammar

• pinyin pronunciation
• basic sentence structures and word orders
• particles ma, ne
• other question words nǎli and shéi
• past tense particle le
• common measure words
• negate verbs with méiyǒu/ méi’
• basis speech pattern dàn shì
• question word jǐ and duō shǎo
• sentence structure cóng…dào
• the use of yǒu
• affirmative/negative question structure hǎo bu hǎo/xíng bu xíng
• past perfect tense
• present continuous particle zài
• use huì to indicate future tense
• three particles ma, ne and ba
• question words shénme shíhou and ji hao, xing qi ji
• zài as preposition
• duōjiǔ for time and duration
• use háishì for alternatives.

You will receive a Certificate of Completion from City St George’s, University of London, along with a digital badge for your LinkedIn profile.

To qualify, you must attend at least 70% of classes.

Teaching

Classes are highly interactive and include:

• Small group work and role-play
• Listening to audio materials (e.g. radio clips)
• Reading articles and texts
• Watching video content
• Digital learning tools to support your progress

You’ll also explore Chinese culture, current affairs and traditions alongside language learning.

This course is aimed as those who are completely new to Chinese.

If you have a little experience, or you are willing to do some self study to catch up, you can join us on one of the later Chinese Beginners modules.

Please do reach out to our team if you’re not sure which level is right for you.

Additional requirements

To enrol onto the Beginners Chinese course, you must:

• Have a good level of spoken and written English
• be age 18 or over
• have basic IT skills and a reliable internet connection to access lessons and course materials.

English requirements

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