This course is designed to help students with no prior background in Mandarin to develop functional communication abilities in all four language skills. Using the standard Hànyu Pinyin phonetic system, a variety of authentic materials, vocabulary and sentence patterns, students will learn to make statements, ask questions, respond to questions and create conversations based upon culturally authentic situations. By the end of this course, students will be able to read and write 250 characters. An online placement test is required.