This is the homepage for the textbook, “Welcome to Chinese”.
“Welcome to Chinese” is a textbook I am designing based on my experiences teaching English in China. While here I discovered that the quality of learning material available to the Chinese is far greater than what English people have for learning Chinese. By comparison most Chinese textbooks in the West contain poorly designed lesson plans and a thrown-together vocabulary, causing students to give up in frustration before they have achieved an ability to understand Chinese. This textbook is intended to try and bridge the gap and help people learn Chinese using more modern language learning methods.
It’s an amateurishly laid out work, and would probably best be served as a companion to my Kongzi program.
Based on comprehensible input theory, “Welcome to Chinese” is being meticulously constructed so that students can begin reading and writing fluently with a very small vocabulary of words. The research I have done leads me to believe that with a carefully selected vocabulary of as few as 100 words, the MCI (massive comprehensible input) method may be used to teach Chinese. This is the goal of “Welcome to Chinese”. Research into precisely what characters to introduce and their order of introduction is currently ongoing – but I think that when the final product is released it will be one of the most innovative and original Chinese textbooks available.
I have no idea when it will be finished, but to give an idea in the latter half of 2009 I began a rewrite and am currently working on Lesson 4 (out of a planned 10 lessons covering a total of 200 characters). I expect now that I am back on the Kongzi project I will take another look at it as Kongzi gears up for beta testing.
This space will contain links to the textbook, which will likely be free, and any associated materials when it is finished.
