A Note to the Learner

Welcome to the second volume of an unusual, and highly effective, two-volume course in spoken Chinese.

As a native English speaker, your working hard to learn Chinese isn’t enough; you have to work smart in order to learn this very different language efficiently. No matter why you’ve chosen to learn Chinese—for business, travel, cultural studies, or another goal—the Basic Chinese approach of two separate but integrated tracks will help you learn it most efficiently and successfully.

There are no Chinese characters to be found here because you don’t need characters to learn to speak Chinese. In fact, learning the characters for everything you learn to say is an inefficient way to learn Chinese, one that significantly slows down your progress.

To help you learn to speak and understand Chinese as efficiently as possible, Intermediate Spoken Chinese gives you the Chinese language portions of this course not via characters, but instead through video and audio featuring native speakers (on the accompanying discs). And in the pages of this book, the Chinese is represented in Hanyu Pinyin, the official Chinese romanization system.

•   Intermediate Spoken Chinese should be used in conjunction with the accompanying Intermediate Spoken Chinese Practice Essentials.

•   If you wish to learn Chinese reading and writing, which is certainly to be recommended for most learners, you should—together with or after the spoken course—use the companion course Intermediate Written Chinese. It corresponds with Intermediate Spoken Chinese and systematically introduces the highest-frequency characters (simplified and traditional) and words in context in sentences and reading passages as well as in realia such as street signs, menus, and advertisements.

•   For instructors and those learners with prior knowledge of Chinese characters, an Intermediate Spoken Chinese Character Transcription is also available. It contains transcriptions into simplified and traditional characters of Intermediate Spoken Chinese and can be downloaded free from the Intermediate Spoken Chinese page at www.tuttlepublishing.com. Please note that the character transcription isn’t intended, and shouldn’t be used, as the primary vehicle for beginning Chinese language students to learn reading and writing.

•   The Basic Chinese Instructor’s Guide, also available free from the publisher, contains detailed suggestions for using these materials as well as a large number of communicative exercises for use by instructors in class or by tutors during practice sessions.