Upper Intermediate Courses

Curriculum

The Upper Intermediate level has 4 courses of 12 lessons each. Our curriculum is set based on Chinese HSK Level 4. No more grammar learning in this level, except for corrections on the use of words for their subtle differences. This level is all about vocabularies. There are further 1200 very useful words to learn in the total of 48 lessons.

The topics covered in this course are normally relevant to current affairs, critical and sometimes even controversial, such as environmental protection, importance of friendship, internet shopping trend, work life balance etc. We have invited 20 native speakers to share their personal opinions on such topics, before we ask the students to express their own, and that’s how we engage students to effectively learn vocabularies on the topics.

Training modules

Upper Intermediate is the level you are being trained to become an independent speaker, ie you might make mistakes, but your message is clear; or you might not know certain words, but you can go around it to explain in a different way via using synonyms perhaps. The key skill we are targeting in this level is discussion and debates, which will require logical and analytical thinking from the students, and adequate words on the topic. It’s a step up from Intermediate’s storytelling skills, but it’s the level where you can say you are getting comfortably fluently. The key modules are Vocab Workshop 词, Sentence Workshop 句, Debate Club 辩，Conversation Flow 谈, Drama Club 看 and Reading Club 读. Chinese Characters 字 are also taught in this course.

Learning content

For learning material, we use HSK Standard Course Book Level 4 to set the curriculum and for reading, while all other tutorial presentations, learning assessment games, fluency practice worksheet and immersive videos are all originally developed by PM academic team, and are exclusive to our students.