Course Description
Beginner
Intensive Reading
This is an introductory course in modern Chinese using Yang Jizhou’s Chinese Course, book I. It places emphasis on the communicative function of the language. Reading, grammar, and conversation are stressed. Open to students who have had no training in Chinese.
Oral Chinese
This is an introductory course in modern Chinese using Kang Yuhua and Lai Siping’s Conversational Chinese 301. With 40 lessons, this book is for people who want to focus on conversational Chinese. Users of this book will be able to handle basic conversational skills. All lessons contains English translation and explanation. This is the most practical and popular book for learning basic Chinese conversational skills.
Listening
We believe that language is essentially acoustic. A baby acquires his or her mother tongue by listening rather than through written forms. Listening skill plays an important role in nurturing a learner’s intuition about the language as a native speaker. This course uses Hu Bo and Yang Xuemei’s Chinese Listening Course (book I) as textbook. It is compiled to support the Chinese Course (book I). It consists of 25 lessons. The exercise in this book are varied in form, including exercises on initials and finals, tones, pronunciation and intonation, word and sentence stresses, and answering questions, choosing the right answers, judging true or false, dictation, retelling and guessing the general idea after listening to the recording, etc.
Intermediate
Intensive Reading
This is a continuing study in modern Chinese using Yang Jizhou’s Chinese Course, book II.
Oral Chinese
This is a continuing study of Kang Yuhua and Lai Siping’s Conversational Chinese 301.
Listening
This is a continuing study of Hu Bo and Yang Xuemei’s Chinese Listening Course (book II). This book, compiled to support the Chinese Course (book II), consists of three parts: Listening Comprehension, Extensive Listening, and Pronunciation and Intonation. Listening Comprehension includes three concrete training items, which are listen to the recording and choose the correct answer, listen to the dialogues and choose the correct answer, and listen to a dialogue/short passage and do the exercises. The Pronunciation and Intonation exercises aim at training the students to distinguish different sounds, tones and sentence stress. This book has 30 lessons and 5 reviews. It puts the most stress of this book on listening comprehension skills, which include catching the main ideas, leaping over the comprehension barriers, guessing and associating, taking advantage of the language contexts, pragmatic comprehension, speed comprehension and memorizing ability and so on.
Advanced
Intensive Reading
A continuing study in modern Chinese using Yang Jizhou’s Chinese Course, book III.
Oral Chinese
A continuing study in modern Chinese using Dai Xixin and Wang Jing‘s Spoken Chinese Course, with a strong emphasis on speaking skills. The text book is compiled to support the Chinese Course (book III). It consists of 20 lessons. Each lesson has four parts, including text, new words, grammar and exercises.
Listening
This is a continuing study of Hu Bo and Yang Xuemei’s Chinese Listening Course (book III). This book is compiled to support the Chinese Course (book III). It has 36 lessons and 6 reviews. Each lesson has two sections: listening comprehension and extensive listening. The first section is subsequently divided into (1)”listen and choose the correct answers”; and (2) “Listen to the dialogue (or passage) and do the exercises”. The first part mainly focuses on single sentences or simple dialogues; the vocabulary and sentence patterns used in this part have, mostly, appeared in Chinese Course (book III). The second part consists mainly of dialogues and passages of about 400 characters long. This is the most important part of each lesson. The extensive listening section contains two short passages, the contents of which vary from lesson to lesson and are mostly related to the content of the second exercise in the listening comprehension section.
Extensive Reading
This course is designed to provide students with extensive opportunities to read and discuss a variety of reading materials in Chinese. In addition, students will have the support of their teachers to practice reading skills and have exposure to Chinese vocabulary. The texts in this book is chosen from newspapers and magazines published in China.