Short Term Spoken Chinese: Elementary

by Cheng Wen Ma Jian Fei Li De Jun

Short-Term Spoken Chinese is a serial textbooks compiled for foreign students who study in short-term Chinese training programs. It mainly aims to develop the students' communication skills. There are altogether five volumes corresponding to five levels which fall into the elementary, intermediate and advanced categories according to the Standards of Chinese Proficiency in order to meet the different needs of short-term learning.

295 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[David]

Very helpful to understand TV Series and Chinese conversations. The grammar points focus on the most common expressions and the texts are culturally significant.

[Robin Krens]

Although it is says Elementary, the level is a bit higher than that. If you just finished a beginner course you are going to have a hard time. At a lowish intermediate level I sometimes struggled understanding the audio and had to stop and play it back. Especially some conjunctions and adverbs stroke me as odd. For example， 至於，甚至，否則，由於，何況，簡直. Although these might be used common in daily conversations, I haven't seen these in other "Elementary" books. Where most books would follow HSK level vocabulary or TOCFL or the like, the books introduces some more day to day informal nouns, verbs and expressions (which are not within HSK level 4 vocabulary). It is however, a good book to improve your listening abilities. I mainly used it for this purpose.