A Quick Guide to Learning Chinese for Beginners.

This textbook hopes to give the English-speaking learner a sequential learning experience of reading and writing Chinese. It was written to meet three aims:- 1. Develop a sequence to efficiently deliver the foundations of the Chinese language to English-speaking students in the shortest time. 2. Make it flexible so that it can easily be adapted by teachers to be able to be used either in schools or colleges. 3. Make it flexible enough so that the teacher can accommodate a wide range of abilities in the same class, from adults who have no experience of Chinese to those who might already have made a start learning the language. Instead of chapters being topic-based, they will be based on common sentence structures. Students will learn about Radicals and, through them, how to search for new words in a Chinese dictionary. Learning to write Chinese characters must start with writing the radicals first. It has to be taught as a systematic series of steps that require precise digital control of the brush or pen. It cannot be achieved as though it only requires memorising an artistic design.