Modern Chinese - Beginner's Course: Reading Comprehension

Simplified Chinese. English and Pinyin comments. 287 pages. Published by BLCU (Beijing Language and Culture Univeristy)press.

Introduction: The book is designed as a reading material after student completes Volume I and II of Modern Chinese - Chinese for Beginners. Upon starting this textbook, the learner will already have acquired a command of basic grammar, approximately 1,200 basic words and expressions, and will have obtained a fair degree of ability in listening, speaking, reading and writing. So to speak, commencing this textbook constitutes entrance to a new stage. The curriculum at this stage consists of intensive reading, reading comprehension and listening comprehension, each with emphasis on one or two skils, and each complementing the other two, in order to accomplish the objective of instruction of this stage.

As the title suggests, Reading Comprehension is intended to help the learner improve their reading proficiency to be specific, the textbook will help: 1) strengthen the learner's senaitivity to Chinese; 2) increase the learner's reading speed; 3) enable the learner to grasp main idea and to skip over obstacles in their reading; 4) expand and deepen the learner's cultural background knowledge. Improving reading proficiency is very important in raising the overall level of language proficiency. In order to achieve this purpose, we have devoted special attention, during the compilation, to three points, extensiveness, quantity and readability.