These books have been designed to help readers with fluency and proficiency within a format of rich cultural content aimed at providing a greater understanding of the Chinese culture. The texts span a number of compelling topics ranging from ancient stories and traditions to current lifestyles and social change. We know of no other textbooks on the market encompassing such variety of topics and written in contemporary, up-to-date Chinese.
Readers of this series are presumed to have learned 500 basic characters from which to work. Unfortunately, when many Chinese language students have gained this level of competency, there are few materials to read to help them maintain their vocabulary and improve their reading skills. Our books have been written with careful attention to characters, expressions, grammar, and sentence structure to help readers achieve greater fluency. Cumbersome notes and explanations are unnecessary to understand the grammar in this series.
In addition to fluency, these texts are intended to help readers increase their vocabulary and use of common expressions. Each lesson contains approximately twenty to thirty new expressions for readers to learn. Some of these expressions may not be completely new, however, because they are combinations of characters readers already know, enabling readers to increase their vocabulary from chapter to chapter. For example, while readers will have already learned the characters for "big" and "person," when combined in the new expression as "big person," readers then learn the expression for "adult." There are hundreds of such examples in these books, as well as numerous current expressions now used in contemporary China.
One of the most powerful tools of language learning is repetition. Editors have worked diligently to ensure that these textbooks contain just the right amount of repetition of expressions and sentence structures. While these repetitions may at times appear redundant or excessive, many of these expressions are used frequently by the Chinese on a daily basis, and readers should gain a sense of their importance and variety of usage.
Readers' increased fluency and proficiency in Chinese is the editors' goal. We have also strived to produce books that make the study of Chinese both interesting and meaningful. Additional titles to enrich cultural understanding and language proficiency include Chinese Myths & Folktales and Life in Beijing, both of which are in our series EASY CHINESE READINGS IN 500 CHARACTERS.
