购物
Gòuwù — Shopping & Money
Numbers finally buy something. Students handle a complete transaction — ask the price, decide, pay, thank — and meet the quirk that Chinese money has one word you say and a different one you write.
Unit objectives
- Ask 多少钱？ and understand the answer
- Say prices using 块 and 毛
- Complete a four-turn buying conversation
- Say something is expensive or cheap
Key vocabulary
多少钱 钱 块 毛 买 卖 贵 便宜 要 给
Two words, one currency
Prices are written with 元 but spoken as 块 — a bit like “pound” versus “quid”:
三块五 3.50 — spoken
3.50元 3.50 — written on the label
Two characters, one sound
买 (buy) and 卖 (sell) differ by one stroke on top and by tone alone:
买 mǎi, third tone · 卖 mài, fourth tone
The clearest proof yet of why tones matter. Getting it wrong reverses the sentence completely.
A complete transaction
How much is it?
Asking prices and hearing them back. Numbers to 100 from Grade 1 come out of storage.
Buy or sell?
The 买/卖 pair, drilled deliberately as a tone-discrimination exercise.
Too expensive!
Reacting to a price, and the vocabulary of polite haggling at a market stall.
Classroom shop
A real shop set up with price labels and paper money. Everyone buys and everyone sells.
A country that stopped carrying cash
Mainland China moved to phone payment faster and more completely than almost anywhere else — QR codes on market stalls, street vendors and temple donation boxes, with many shops no longer keen on notes at all. That makes this unit’s paper money slightly historical, which is worth saying out loud to students. The words are unchanged; the gesture is now scanning a code rather than handing over a note. Haggling at markets, on the other hand, is very much alive.
Unit 3 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child ask a price and understand the answer?
- Can they say 买 and 卖 distinguishably?
- Can they run a four-turn shop conversation?
Understanding a spoken price is harder than saying one. Practise listening to prices more than producing them.