Success With Chinese ― A Communicative Approach for Beginners, Reading & Writing, Level 1

Level 1: Reading & Writing helps you achieve a basic proficiency in reading and writing Chinese. If you are traveling or working in China and want to read signs, menus, and short passages, or fill out simple forms and write some characters and short sentences, this book is perfect for you. Reading & Writing first teaches radicals and characters commonly encountered in everyday life, and then moves on to critical reading strategies to help learners quickly apply newly acquired character recognition skills to unfamiliar words and phrases. By focusing on helping learners read in context rather than translating a sentence one character at a time, Reading & Writing sets learners on the path toward literacy in Chinese.

Level 1 is typically used as a semester or summer course. Eighteen lessons in the Reading & Writing book cover 240 characters; each lesson thematically corresponds to the lessons in Listening & Speaking. This second edition of Level 1: Reading & Writing contains both simplified and traditional characters in vocabulary lists and indexes.

About the Series
English speakers learn to converse in Chinese faster than they learn to read and write it. Success with Chinese’s special teaching method focuses on that essential fact by coordinating Listening & Speaking and Reading & Writing separately. This two-part structure allows for flexibility in designing the instruction and learning process, and empowers students to learn more effectively by first concentrating on listening and speaking, and then reading and writing at a slower pace.

Listening & Speaking
Equally effective for classroom use or for independent study, Success with Chinese’s lessons help build a solid foundation by using daily experiences as practical opportunities for learning and mastering the basics of Chinese. For instance, instead of starting Listening & Speaking with the typical textbook exchanges such as “How are you?”, Success with Chinese takes you onto the streets of China to shop for the essentials you need. In the Listening & Speaking volumes, each lesson includes key expressions and sample conversations, pronunciation exercises, notes on grammar, sentence pattern drills, and communicative exercises. Each Listening & Speaking textbook includes two audio CDs bound into the book.

Reading & Writing
The Reading & Writing volumes help students to learn radicals, and simple characters in restaurant menus, signs, and other materials. Instead of focusing on character memorization, Success with Chinese teaches critical reading strategies that will help students apply their knowledge of characters to understand the general meaning of a phrase, even when confronting unfamiliar words. Students also learn how to type Chinese on a computer using pinyin, and to write by hand the most essential characters they need to fill out forms, leave messages, and communicate basic needs.

Success with Chinese trains beginning students to the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) novice level. There are two levels of study, and each level includes a Listening & Speaking volume and a separate Reading & Writing volume. Level 1, typically used as a semester or summer course, teaches around 400 vocabulary items (L&S) and 240 characters (R&W). Level 2 teaches 651 vocabulary items (L&S) and 489 characters (R&W). Two audio CDs accompany each Listening & Speaking volume. Books use simplified characters with pinyin (second editions include traditional characters).