of all kinds: Jerling Guo Kubler, Eric Pelzl, Weibing Ye, Shaopeng Zhang, and my most collegial colleagues in the Chinese Program at Williams College, present and past: Cecilia Chang, Bing Han, Yu-yin Hsu, Hao-hsiang Liao, Christopher M. B. Nugent, Cathy Silber, Hsin-I Tseng, Yang Wang, and Li Yu.
For making the accompanying audio recordings: Jerling Guo Kubler, Fei Wang, and Shaopeng Zhang.
For providing useful information on the frequency of Chinese words and characters, as well as much appreciated inspiration and encouragement over many years: James E. Dew. I should also acknowledge here my debt to Victor H. Mair for his many stimulating comments over the years concerning the Chinese writing system.
For advice and assistance with computer-related work: Adam Jianjun Wang, Senior Instructional Technology specialist at Williams College, and Peter Leimbigler of Asia Communications Québec Inc. All of the Chinese language content in this volume was processed using the KEY 5.1 Chinese language software that Dr. Leimbigler and his colleagues developed.
For meticulous editing and many other helpful suggestions during the production of this course: Sandra Korinchak, Former Senior Editor at Tuttle Publishing. I also wish to express my appreciation for their enthusiastic support of the project and its development to Tuttle’s Publisher Eric Oey and Vice President Christina Ong; and to Nancy Goh, Ngo Su Yin, and the Tuttle Sales and Marketing team for their expertise and assistance throughout.
Logistical and financial support from the following during the final stage of the preparation of these materials is gratefully acknowledged: Tseng Chin-Chin and staff at the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan Normal University; and Jenny F. So and staff at the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Last but not least, I wish to thank the students in the basic Chinese classes at Williams College from 1993 through 2010 for their corrections and suggestions, as well as for their encouragement and inspiration.
Cornelius C. Kubler
Department of Asian Studies
Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
Orientation
About This Course
Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing constitute an introductory course in modern Chinese (Mandarin), the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world, which is the official language of mainland China and Taiwan and one of the official languages of Singapore. The focus of this course, which is designed for adult English-speaking learners, is on communicating in Chinese in practical, everyday situations. We have tried to keep in mind the needs of a wide range of users, from college and university students to business people and government personnel. With some adjustments in the rate of progress, high school students may also be able to use these materials to their advantage. By availing themselves of the detailed usage notes and making good use of the Practice Books, the video, and the audio, it is even possible for motivated self-learners to work through these materials on their own, though it would be desirable for them to meet with a teacher or native speaker for an hour or two per week, if possible. Although users with specialized needs will, in the later stages of their study, require supplementary materials, we believe this course provides a solid general foundation or “base” (hence the title of the course) that all learners of Chinese need, on which they may build for future mastery.
The course is divided into spoken and written tracks, each with various types of ancillary materials. The following diagram will clarify the organization of the whole course:
Several modes of study are possible for these materials: (1) the spoken series only; (2) a lesson in the spoken series followed a few days, weeks, or months later by the corresponding lesson in the written series; and (3) a lesson in the spoken and written series studied simultaneously. What is not possible is to study the written series first or only, since the written series assumes knowledge of the pronunciation system and relevant grammatical and cultural information, which are introduced in the spoken series.
Students embarking upon the study of Chinese should be aware that, along with Japanese, Korean, and Arabic, Chinese is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers. This course makes no pretensions of being an “easy” introduction to the language. However, students can be assured that if they make the effort to master thoroughly the material presented here, they will acquire a solid foundation in Chinese.
The proficiency goals in speaking and reading by completion of the Intermediate Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Intermediate Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing portions of the course are Intermediate-High on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Chinese Proficiency Guidelines, which correlates with S-1+/R-1+ on the U.S. government Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Language Skill Level Descriptions. By the time they attain this level, learners will be able to conduct simple, practical conversations with Chinese speakers on a variety of everyday topics (cf. Table of Contents). They will also be able to read simple, connected texts printed in simplified or traditional Chinese characters and recognize about 600 high-frequency characters and common words written with them. Of course, they will not yet be able to conduct conversations on professional topics or read newspapers or novels, skills that in the case of Chinese take a considerably longer time to develop.
Some of the special features of Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing include:
Separate but integrated tracks in spoken and written Chinese. Most textbooks for teaching basic Chinese teach oral and written skills from the same materials, which are covered at a single rate of progress. Students typically study a dialog, learn how to use in their speech the words and grammar contained in the dialog, and also learn how to read and write every character used to write the dialog. But the fact is that, due to the inherent difficulty of Chinese characters, native English speakers can learn spoken Chinese words much faster than they can learn the characters used to write those words. As East Asian language pedagogues Eleanor H. Jorden and A. Ronald Walton have argued,1 why must the rate of progress in spoken Chinese be slowed down to the maximum possible rate of progress in written Chinese? Moreover, in Chinese, more than in most languages, there are substantial differences between standard spoken style and standard written style, with many words and grammar patterns that are common in speech being rare in writing or vice versa. For all these reasons, this course uses separate but related materials for training in spoken and written Chinese. However, reflecting the fact that written Chinese is based on spoken Chinese, and so as to mutually reinforce the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), the written track is closely integrated with the spoken track. A day’s spoken lesson is based on a conversation typically introducing one to three new grammar patterns and 15 to 20 new spoken words, while the corresponding written lesson introduces six new high-frequency characters and a number of words that are written using them, chosen from among (but not including all of) the characters used to write the basic conversation of the corresponding lesson. Experience shows that the learning of written skills in Chinese proceeds more efficiently if learners study for reading and writing the characters for words they have previously learned for speaking and comprehension. Under this approach, when students take up a new lesson in written Chinese, they already know the pronunciations, meanings, and usages of the new words, needing only to learn their written representations—which considerably lightens the learning
