This is intended to be an intensive course book for nonChinese speakers who just started to learn Chinese. The book consists of 40 lessons and 8 reviews. The 40 lessons encompass nearly 30 communicative functions such as "Greeting" and "Making an Acquaintance", about 800 new words and the fundamentals of Chinese grammar. Each lesson is divided into six parts --Sentence, Conversation, Substitution and Extension, New Words, Grammar, and Exercises.
This book lays emphasis on improving the ability of the learner to use Chinese for communication. It integrates the communicative function with the grammatical structure and presents the most essential and useful part of the language in the linguistic environments one is usually exposed to in daily life, so as to enable the learner to master the 301 basic conversational sentences fairly quickly, and on that basis, through substitution and extension practice, to acquire the ability to carry on simple conversations with the Chinese. In this way, the book will also help lay a solid foundation for further study.
