Basic Mandarin Chinese - Reading & Writing Practice Book: A Workbook for Beginning Learners of Written Chinese (MP3 Audio CD and Printable Flash Cards Included)

(, Revised)

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Description

This comprehensive Chinese character workbook can be used with any textbook or on its own to dramatically enhance your Mandarin reading and writing skills!

No matter what textbook you're using to learn Chinese, it requires a lot of practice. Here is a wealth of effective activities and drills plus an hour of native speaker audio recordings to help you learn the 288 basic Chinese characters quickly and effectively. This book follows the Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing textbook but works equally well with other course books or on its own. The free disc contains audio recordings as well as printable PDF files providing hundreds of pages of extra exercises and activities and a set of 288 printable flash cards to help you learn the basic characters. Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading and Writing Practice Book includes a wealth of carefully-designed activities designed to improve every aspect of your reading and writing skills, including:

• Character writing practice sheets
  
• Dictation, fill-in-the-blank, and dialog completion exercises
  
• Answering questions, reading maps, converting written style to spoken style
  
• Identifying radicals and phonetics, punctuating sentences
  
• Writing tasks based on real-life schedules, photographs, and name cards
  
• Translation exercises.

The accompanying disc contains:

• Audio recordings by native Mandarin speakers
  
• Hundreds of printable practice pages
  
• A printable set of 288 Chinese flashcards.

Reviews

"Outstanding for its carefully graduated presentation of material and perhaps most important of all, its separation of the task of learning to speak the language from the very different processes of learning to read and write Chinese characters The most exciting Chinese language textbook I have seen in many years." --Dr. James E. Dew, retired associate professor of Chinese, Univ. of Michigan; former Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei
"A breath of fresh air Its dual track for spoken and written language finally gives American students a chance to develop oral proficiency without being slowed down by the character writing An ideal textbook for any program that seeks to advance rapidly in spoken Chinese and to fully prepare the students for their encounter with China." --Dr. Jingqi Fu, Associate Professor of Chinese, St. Mary's College of Maryland
"Contextualized so learners know not only what to say, but why, when, and with whom it is appropriate to use such language -- thorough and clear -- refreshing." --Dr. Matthew Christensen, Associate Professor of Chinese, Brigham Young University

Author Bio

Cornelius C. Kubler received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Cornell and is currently the Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies at Williams College. Since joining Williams, he has chaired the Department of Chinese and held visiting professor posts at Middlebury, National Taiwan Normal University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and other universities. He has authored many books and articles on Chinese pedagogy and linguistics, and served as a consultant for many Chinese language programs in the U.S. and abroad including orientation programs for Chinese language teachers arriving in the U.S. He has chaired the SAT Chinese exam Test Development Committee and recently completed a two-year stint as Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Nanjing University Center for Chinese & American Studies in Nanjing, China.

Jerling Guo Kubler is a graduate of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Soochow University in Taipei. Her experience in language education spans several decades, and she has taught Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language at all levels from pre-kindergarten to university level at institutions in the U.S. and Taiwan including Williams College, Eisenhower College and the Taipei Language Institute.