An Advanced Course in Modern Chinese is a National Planned Textbook for the “10th Five-Year” General Higher Education. This is its revised edition.
This series of textbooks is developed by the teaching and research office of advanced Chinese in the Department of Chinese Language and Culture, College of Chinese Studies, BLCU. The authors are all experienced teachers and textbook writers. The texts in this book vary in themes and genres, including essays, satirical essays, stories, expository, practical and argumentative writings, and so on. The compilation of the book observes the principle of combining structure and function and meanwhile integrates the teaching of cultural factors.
There are three volumes in the series, with 10 lessons in each. Each lesson consists of three parts: texts, language points, and exercises. Adjustments, additions and improvements have been made to the texts, the arrangement of the new words, the explanations of language points and the design of exercises, making the book better to use.
This is Volume 1 of the book. The part of language points in each lesson includes word illustrations, discrimination of synonyms, word explanations and grammar explanations. The word illustrations focus on explaining the usages of function words, including common classical Chinese function words; the discrimination of synonyms emphasizes the differences between the usages of common synonyms; the word explanations aim to add some basic vocabulary knowledge; and the grammar explanations sum up the common advanced-level grammatical phenomena which have appeared in the texts, giving systematic explanations of complex sentences. The part of exercises focus on the training in vocabulary and grammar, with considerable attention paid to morphemes and discourses.
An MP3 CD with text recordings is included in the book.

Mr. Ma Shude, the chief author of the book, is a professor in the College of Chinese Studies of BLCU. Mr. Ma graduated from PLA University of Foreign Languages in 1967 and has been teaching Chinese as a foreign language since 1973. He was a teacher in the Chinese Department of the University of Bonn between 1988 and 1993. An Advanced Course in Modern Chinese has been acknowledged as a National Planned Textbook for the “10th Five-Year” General Higher Education and a “Top-Quality Textbook for Higher Education in Beijing”.