Mandarin Flight: Follow the Announcements

How to play: you are the passenger in seat 32A on a flight to Tokyo, and everything anybody says to you is in Mandarin. An announcement comes over the cabin speakers, or the attendant stops at your row — and instead of picking a translation, you do the thing: open the window shade, put the tray table back, switch the reading light off, press the call button. The whole cabin is on screen the entire time, so you have to read both halves of the sentence — which object, and which direction. 请打开遮光板 and 请关上遮光板 name the same shade and are opposite answers. Three surfaces answer the three kinds of cue: the cabin panel, a seat map of thirty seats for anything with a row number in it, and the service trolley at meal time. Get it wrong and the wrong thing happens — reach for the seat belt when you were asked about the overhead bin and the belt really does fasten — then the panel marks what the line asked for, the crew put you right, and the cue comes back around later. There is no failing and no time limit. What the clock remembers is how long the leg took, and the stamps how many you got first time. Five legs make the flight: boarding, the safety demonstration, cruise, the meal service, and landing — and the cabin grows from four things you can touch to eighteen as the flight goes on.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Lesson 5 scale the next flight sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level flies the leg the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels board through the safety demonstration and cruise, and from level five the meal service and landing hold at their fullest while the lesson keeps going. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the pinyin and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the pinyin alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. The difficulty is a free choice at every level. It is the fifth lesson of the Mandarin course, and it picks up where Mandarin Airport — the check-in hall — leaves you at the gate.