Getting Around in Chinese: Chinese Skits for Beginners

This video-and-text teaching program focuses on building the practical spoken skills of beginning students. The video, produced by the Language Resource Center at the University of Michigan, features thirty skits that cover a wide range of daily activities such as introducing yourself, inviting a friend to the movies, asking for directions, talking about your family, and shopping. The skits provide a model for students to learn and then improvise on. Each segment introduces new vocabulary and reviews grammatical structures. Excellent for improving pronunciation, tones, and listening comprehension, as well as providing an opportunity for beginning students to learn Chinese body language and gestures. The accompanying textbook includes the dialogues in English and pinyin along with character text in both simplified and traditional characters, vocabulary lists with sample sentences to clarify proper use of key expressions, and discussion questions.