Speedy Chinese: Beginner's Course: Comprehensive Textbook 1

Author: Guo Zhiliang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1996-08-01
Features: The textbook is arranged as follows: A total of 80 lessons, with pronunciation teaching integrated throughout. Lessons 1-10 focus on pronunciation (initials, finals, tones), without involving grammar or functions; Lessons 11-80 emphasize grammar and functions while also covering pronunciation (difficult sounds, difficult tones, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, etc.). When compiling the texts, we carefully selected and arranged topics. Content related to daily life, study, and communication was prioritized, while cultural content introducing China's national conditions and the customs and values of Chinese people was included later. Among the content on China's national conditions, the focus is on positive social factors, but some lessons reflect negative aspects to avoid detachment from reality and prevent misleading effects. The selection of text content is constrained by certain grammatical points, but not overly rigid, with emphasis on fluency and interest. The length gradually increases, but generally does not exceed 500 words per lesson. There are over 3,400 new words in total (excluding proper nouns). The phonetic transcriptions are primarily based on the Modern Chinese Dictionary compiled by the Dictionary Editing Office of the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, with occasional references to the Lexical Grading Outline compiled by the Research Group on Chinese Proficiency Level Standards. The part-of-speech classifications mainly refer to the New Comprehensive Modern Chinese Dictionary edited by Feng Zhizhun and others. There are about 43 new words per lesson on average, with students only required to master the key vocabulary of each lesson. The selection of grammatical points is mainly based on the Grammatical Grading Outline compiled by the Research Group on Chinese Proficiency Level Standards. For the grammatical points covered in the textbook, all but a few at the A level are included, most at the B level, and some at the C level. We adjusted a few grammatical points, expanding the scope of directional complements, resultative complements, and subject-predicate predicate sentences, while adding state complements and quantity complements. Difficult grammatical points are distributed. For grammatical points that appear in the texts, we adopt a differentiated approach: key points have more annotations, secondary key points have brief annotations, and non-key points are not annotated, such as serial sentences and coordinate sentences. Grammatical points are not annotated one by one; they are generally (inductive) and the usage conditions are explained.