Basic Spoken Chinese Practice Essentials

Use this one-of-a-kind practice guide together with any Chinese book or language program, and dramatically enhance your speaking and listening skills.

No matter what book or course you're using to learn Chinese, it takes a lot of practice. Here is a wealth of effective practice activities—including more than 16 hours of audio material!—to help polish your spoken Mandarin Chinese. This book corresponds to Basic Spoken Chinese and allows you to move from complete beginner level to basic proficiency. Along with this book comes access to over 16 hours of audio material, as well as (printable) PDF files of hundreds of additional practice pages and exercises.

Basic Spoken Chinese Practice Essentials includes carefully designed activities to help solidify every aspect of your spoken Chinese skills, including:

• Pronunciation exercises .
• Vocabulary and Grammar summaries .
• Substitution drills .
• Transformation and Response drills .
• Role Play & Listening Comprehension exercises .
• Dictation exercises .
• Translation exercises .

The accompanying online media kit contains:

• 16 hours of audio by native Mandarin speakers.
• Printable practice pages.
• Printable exercises and activities.

Together with or after this book, you can use Basic Written Chinese if you want to learn Chinese reading and writing. It introduces the highest-frequency characters and words in a systematic way.

About the Series Respected Chinese language expert Dr. Cornelius Kubler, who has taught diplomats, business people and students, presents a learning system that uses separate but integrated "tracks" to help you efficiently master the basics of spoken and written Chinese. The materials in the Basic Spoken Chinese series allow you to move from complete beginner level to intermediate fluency.

All media content is accessible on the Tuttle Publishing website.

Cornelius C. Kubler, Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies at Williams College, received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics from Cornell University. He earned a second M.A. in Chinese literature from National Taiwan University.

From 1980-1991 he was employed at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, where he served as Language Training Supervisor in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Mongolian; as Principal of the advanced Chinese field school in Taiwan; and as Chair of the Department of Asian and African Languages.

Since joining Williams College in 1991, he has chaired the former Department of Chinese and Asian Studies Program as well as the Department of Asian Studies, which he was instrumental in founding. He has also served as visiting professor at Eisenhower College, Portland State University, Middlebury College, National Taiwan Normal University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages.

Kubler, who is author or coauthor of 20 books and over 50 articles on Chinese language pedagogy and linguistics, frequently serves as reviewer or consultant for Chinese and Asian Studies programs in the U.S. and overseas. He has served as Chair of the Test Development Committee for the SAT Subject Test in Chinese and as member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages of the Modern Language Association. He is currently serving as American Co-Director of The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China.

Yang Wang, native to Beijing, is Senior Lecturer in Chinese at Brown University, where she teaches all levels of modern Chinese language. Before joining the Brown faculty, she taught Chinese at The Ohio State University and Williams College. She also taught for several years at the Middlebury College Summer Chinese School. Wang is interested in the implications of pragmatics in Chinese pedagogical practice, teaching materials development, and the integration of technology into the curriculum.