As China emerges as a global superpower with increasing global opportunities, an unprecedented number of students are pursuing Chinese studies in the US, primarily in Mandarin. Many universities offer special sections of their introductory courses for heritage speakers of Mandarin, who have grown up speaking Chinese at home but never in the classroom. These sections are tailored to the specific needs of heritage speakers, who tend to have strong speaking and listening skills and need more practice with reading and writing. Me and China was created specifically for these students, taking student-centered approach with topics that are relevant and engaging to American students of Chinese heritage. The text comes with two audio CDs, to be used in conjunction with an integrated workbook.
Table of contents
1. The textbook consists of four parts: Introduction, Unit One, Unit Two and Unit Three.
The Introduction consist of Pinyin, relevant Pinyin spelling rules and a Pinyin chart, basic components and radicals of Chinese characters, the strokes and stroke-order of Chinese characters, the comparison between traditional and simplified characters.
Unit One has five lessons, which are mostly focused on the students themselves and their life, such as introducing oneself, one’s family, one’s grandparents and university life. Unit Two has five lessons, which mostly concern Chinese culture, such as Chinese population, ethnic groups, Chinese characters and family names. Unit Three has six lessons, regarding Chinese behavioral culture and related cultural psychology, such as the gaetronomic culture, how the Chinese address one another, terms of address used by Chinese people, and Chinese modesty.
2. Each lesson includes a text, a vocabulary, strokes and stroke-order of Chinese characters (from Lesson 1 to Lesson 10 ), grammar notes, a reading passages and exercises. This textbook comes in traditional and simplified characters.
3. At the end of the textbook there is a Chinese-English vocabulary index in alphabetical order.
4. We show the strokes and stroke-order for the new words whose traditional form and simplified form are the same. The new words whose traditional and simplified forms are different and certain difficult characters are marked with the serial numbers of writing order.
5. There are 2 CDs packaged within the book, including the texts, new words and reading passages.
By Qian He, Yenna Wu and Yang Ying, Paperback, Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters, Pinyin and English, 317 pages, 11.25"x8.25", 2 CDs
