Learn Chinese from Native Speakers

Learn Basic Chinese

Language Experts agree, our courses are the most complete and thorough self-instructional language course available. Our competitors like Rosetta Stone would like you to believe learning a language is easy and fun. We think they are being dishonest. The truth about learning a language is it takes time. Repetition, vocabulary, sentence structure are the building blocks our course utilizes to teach a language. Lots of repetition drills. Dialog drills. Pronunciation drills. Vocabulary. Your investment in a language course is your time. The audio material is from native speakers and the corresponding textbook is your guide. There are no short cuts. Our Methodology, Guided Imitation, sets the student on a path to a certified level of fluency. Our courses are the most comprehensive self instructional language material available on the market.

If you order the Chinese Combo, you will also receive the Out and About Beijing interactive CD-ROM program, an $80 value at no additional charge.

The Chinese Basic Volume I contains Units 1-15 and comes with 15 CD's and a 408 page textbook.This Cantonese Basic Course is a course in spoken Cantonese. It uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a ocabulary of approximately 950 words. The subject matter of the course deals with daily life in Hong Kong.

The Chinese Basic Volume II contains Units 16-30, and comes with 15 CD's and a 413 page textbook or 1 DVD with Audio on MP3 and textbook on a PDF file.

The Chinese Basic Combo contains Units 1-30 and comes with 30 CD's and two textbooks or 2 DVD's with audio on MP3 and textbooks in PDF files.

This Cantonese Basic Course is a course in spoken Cantonese. It uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of approximately 950 words. The subject matter of the course deals with daily life in Hong Kong. There are 30 lessons in the course. Each lesson contains five sections: I) a Basic Conversation to be memorized, II) Notes, III) Pattern Drills, structural drills, IV) Conversations for Listening, a listening comprehension section, and V) Say it in Cantonese, English to Cantoneee practice, much of it in conversational question-answer form, in which students activate what they have learned in the lesson. The early lessons in addition contain explanation and practice drills on pronunciation points, and some classroom phrases for the students to learn to respond.

Objectives of the course

The objectives of the course are to teach students to speak Standard Cantonese in the locales where Cantonese is spoken, to speak it fluently and grammatically, with acceptable pronunciation, within the scope of topics of daily life. The course was not designed to lay the groundwork for learning the written language. At the end of the course students will be able to buy things; talk on the telephone; ask and give directions; handle money; discuss events past, present, and future; make comparisons; talk about themselves and their families; tell time; order simple meals; talk with the landlord, doctor, servant, bellboy, cabdriTer, waiter, sales-clerk; discuss what, when, where, why, who, how, how much.

All the conversations and drills in this book were written by native Cantonese .peakers working under the direction of an American linguist who specified which grammatical points to cover and what situations were required. The design of the text--what to cover, what sequence to use in introducing new material, what limits to set on vocabulary--, the write-ups of structure notes, types and layouts of pattern drills, and the contents of the English-to-Chinese translation sections, were done by the American linguist.

Pronunciation Practice

In general, the Pronunciation Practices concentrate on giving limited explanation and fuller practice drills on new sounds encountered in a lesson, plus comparison drills with sounds previously learned and sometimes coaparisons with American close counterparts. Instead of giving many examples, using items unknown to the students the pronunciation drills stick to examples from material they have met in the Basic Conversation or Pattern Drills. The exception to this is Lesson One, which presents aa overview of all the tones, consonant initials, and vocalic finals of the language, in addition to giving an introduction to intonation and stress. Students who absorb pronunciation best thouugh mimicking the model and who find the linguistic description of sounds confusing or boring or both, should concentrate on mimicking the model and skimp or skip the explanations.