Business mandarin textbooks help!

Hi all,

For mandarin speakers, do you have any good textbooks to suggest to improve my understanding of Chinese financial terms? My purpose is to be able to read and understand Chinese business documents such as contracts and annual reports and be able to negotiate based on them. It would be great if the textbook has both english/chinese translations side by side.

I am aware of resources like the Merrill Lynch / Tsinghua document where they list out financial terms. But that doesn't teach how to interpret business documents. Also, there are tonnes of business mandarin books out there but those do not teach you financial terms, they merely teach you how to converse in a work setting with your colleagues eg. talk about placement in international school for your kids... not exactly what I am looking for.

Many thanks!

 

To be honest I would advise against starting with an online course. You'll be able to learn plenty of vocabulary but I think anyone's pronunciation and grasp of the grammar patterns would be very poor if they only took an online course (remember Mandarin is a tonal language -- most foreigners' tones are abysmal even if they studied the language with a teacher). I have been studying it in university for three years and am just now getting to the point where I am considering taking a supplemental online course to learn business/finance vocabulary. If you are dead set on doing it online your best bet would to be to sign up with one of those services where you actually take classes face to face with a teacher in China over skype (you can google around for these, they seem to run around $10-15/hr).

 

holy shit? six languages? That's amazing. In this day and age, I'd rather be fluent in six languages than have a harvard degree. IMO, the former is much harder.

For many years I've heard people raving about Rosetta Stone- though I'm sure you're already aware of it.

 

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