Description

This series of textbooks and accompanying audio is an extremely comprehensive course in Mandarin, covering grammar in depth and providing many exercises to improve fluency.The textbooks provides a general understanding of the language whilst the readers improve reading skills and help to reinforce what has already been learned.There are roughly 148 hours of audio material.Unfortunately I can only find PDFs for Beginning Chinese (1st and 2nd edition; the audio follows the 2nd edition) and the Character Text for Beginning Chinese. Nevertheless the audio for the other textbooks can be used on their own if one already has a foundation in Mandarin, and provide vital exposure to the target language.From http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300020588:A complete revision of the first volume in the Yale Linguistic Series, this new version, in pinyin romanization, and aimed at secondary school and college levels, is an introduction to spoken Chinese. It includes dialogues, pronunciation drills, sentence-building exercises, examples of characters, substitution drills, and miscellaneous exercises in the form of games like crossword puzzles. There is a combined glossary-index, supplementary vocabulary for each lesson, notes, and a detailed suggested study guide.John De Francis is research professor of Chinese at Seton Hall University. Yale Linguistics Series, 1. The features of this introductory text for learning the Chinese language include:- Pinyin romanization-Vocabulary of 600 items- Pronunciation drills, dialogues, sentence-building exercises, pattern drills, substitution tables, games and other learning aids, memorization exercises, and a combined glossary-index- No characters are used