Chinese (Mandarin)/How To Use This Textbook

Expectations
This textbook will assume that you have no prior knowledge of Chinese, but are willing to take Chinese as a serious subject of study. Each lesson contains a combination of new vocabulary and new grammar in a gradual progression, building on previous lessons.

Each lesson should be appropriate for a week's worth of daily classes, so don't feel overwhelmed by the amount of material per lesson. Learning to write new characters will probably be your limiting factor, so split up the memorization of a lesson's characters over two or three days and use class time mostly for work on grammar and speaking skills.

Lesson Sections
Each lesson consists of five parts:


 * 1) Dialogue. Here you will see a dialogue carried out by two or more people. All texts are given in 4 versions: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin, and an English translation.
 * 2) Grammar. This section breaks down all of the new sentence structures introduced in the dialogue and shows example sentences to reinforce them.
 * 3) Vocabulary. New vocabulary for the lesson, with translation and pronunciation. Every newly introduced character will be linked to an image or animation showing its stroke order.
 * 4) Examples. A page of sentences and phrases giving more examples based on the lesson material.
 * 5) Exercises. Questions and activities to test comprehension of the material. May be used as homework or as review material for lesson exams.

Wikibook Navigation
All the lessons and appendices of this Wikibook are arranged as subpages of the Chinese main page (the Table of Contents). Navigating between lessons is done by clicking the appropriate link in the green mini-Table of Contents box found at the top and bottom of every page. To navigate to less-commonly-accessed pages from a subpage, you must first return to the Chinese main page by clicking on "< Chinese" which appears in the top left corner of all subpages.

Additionally, lesson subpages have subpages branching off of them which contain supporting material for the lesson such as examples, exercises, and animations demonstrating the stroke orders of new characters. You'll also find "Traditional" listed as a subpage, which is a toggle button for accessing the traditional version of the page. Click on it, and "Simplified" replaces it, meaning you can easily switch back and forth between the simplified and traditional character versions of this text.

Cinese/Guida al libro