College Mandarin Chinese on Your Own Beginning Level

Chinese Pinyin Simple Finals and Tones

Pinyin initials part 2

Introduce some special spelling rules in pinyin system.

This lecture is a pinyin practice, at the same time provides a cultural taste of the homology of Chinese written characters, syntactic idiosyncrasy of classical Chinese poetry, the composition principle (blank space) of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy, as well as Taoist philosophy.

This lecture introduces Chinese written system: the six types of Chinese written characters and how they are formed.

This lecture introduces and practices the 16 basic strokes that construct Chinese written characters.

This lecture demonstrates how to write a Chinese character: the six guiding principles of Chinese character stroke order, in other words, the order by which each stroke is added to form a written character.during your writing.

This lecture introduces 20 most commonly-used radicals---the meaningful component of a Chinese character. Being able to recognize their meanings and to write them will allow you to recognize the categories of meaning of thousands of Chinese written characters and to write the half part of these characters.

This PDF version is provided to you for reviewing the basic Chinese radicals more conveniently. Being familiar with these radicals allow you to know the category of meaning thousands of Chinese characters fall into and to write half part of these characters.

This document teaches you how to write these radicals in the correct stroke order. Practice as much as possible. You need to remember their written form and their meanings. You need to be able to write them yourself. It will greatly convenience your future learning of writing thousands of characters.

Radical is the meaningful part of a character. This is the second part of the 40 most commonly used radicals I introduced to you. Remember these 40 radicals will allow you to recognize the category of meaning of most Chinese characters. Being able to write these radicals allows you to write the half part of thousands of Chinese characters.

This PDF version of Basic Chinese Radicals part 2 teaches you how to write these radicals in the correct stroke order. Practice until you remember them.

This lecture introduces and practices the vocabulary and grammar of lesson l dialogue 1. The design is such: as soon as you learned 5-7 vocabularies (or 1 grammar) on a single slide (you need to read after me and closely imitate my pronunciation and tones when you do it), you will pause the slide and flash memorize the pronunciation and meaning of these vocabularies, as well as their usage in sentence context (but you do not need to remember the written form of characters yet in this lecture, you will practice writing them later in this lesson), so you can do the oral exercise (describe pictures, answer questions with the hint of these pictures, translation, etc) in the very next slide (with pictures but no written Chinese). You need to do each of these exercise on your own, orally, drawing on your memory of your just learned vocabularies from last slide in the pause I give you after each of my questions, BEFORE I provide orally the correct answer for your to check and speak after. It is essential you practice BEFORE I provide answers, as the mental effort to do it on your own makes your practice more effective and memorable. Such format brings teaching, reviewing, testing and application of language into a quick circulation: you learn quickly and immediately apply language information you just learned.

This PDF version of vocabulary and grammar is added for your reviewing of the lecture I taught above.

You need to preview the PDF version of lesson 1 dialogue 1 text, make sure you comprehend the Chinese text, before you go to the next lecture practicing reading the text and answering questions about the text. This version is also convenient for you to review the text whenever you need to.

In this lecture you will read after me sentence by sentence to ensure the accuracy of your pronunciation and tones, and practice listening comprehension of the text and answering questions about the text. During the first time of my reading of the text, you can look at the pinyin text, I will give you a pause after I read each sentence, a pause for you to read after me, so to ensure the accuracy of your pronunciation and tones, before I read the next sentence. Make sure you know the meaning as you read along and memorize the text content as well as the sentence structure. In the second time, you can look at the Chinese character text when you read after me so you can learn to recognize Chinese character text. In the third time, you just listen to my reading, try not to look at the text, comprehend the text solely through listening, and then answer the questions (best without looking at the text) from your memory of the text, BEFORE I provide correct answers. Repeat after my correct answers to strengthen your practice of language.

This PDF document specify the stroke order of characters learned in lesson 1 dialogue 1, please practice them at least 5 times, remember the stroke order. In the first 3 times, you can copy the characters according to my specification of stroke order, in the last two times, write these characters in the correct stroke order out of your memory.

The descriptions and guiding lines of this lecture and all the following lectures follow the same pattern as I specified in lesson 1 dialogue 1 that you studied before this, as the corresponding sections of each lesson and dialogue follows the same kind of design and practicing principles.

You need to preview the text, comprehend the Chinese text with the help of English translation, before you go to practicing the text in the next lecture.

This is a video of lesson 1 dialogue 1. You can use it to practice listening comprehension and speaking.

This is the unit test and answer sheet for lesson 1 and 2. Do the test yourself and then check my answer sheet placed immediately after the test on a new page.