Chinese Crash Course is a series of multi-media Chinese learning materials intended for Chinese beginners whose native language is English. It emphasizes "speeded-up mastery" and "practicality". Different from the traditional classroom teaching, it aims at helping the learners reach the intermediate level within a short period of time and  develop their ability to "speak out written Chinese" on formal occasions and meet their needs in life and work in China through proper use of Chinese. The whole series include 3 volumes of textbooks, 5 CDs and 3 CD-ROMs, convenient for learners to study on their own.

The former two volumes contain 30 texts which are mainly dialogues about foreign people's life and work in China and business communication; the 15 texts in Volume Three are mainly short articles with about 400 characters, introducing the Chinese writing styles such as narrative, expositive, expressive, descriptive, story-telling, etc. The dialogues and short passages adopt the method of "functional sentences consolidating learning". All the sentences in the textbook are the core sentences that are extendible to many situations. The grammar points are illustrated with example sentences and are emphasized in "Sentence Patterns". The compilers try to strengthen the functional sentences by exercises and help the learners master commonly used words of intermediate Chinese.

The three volumes have a total vocabulary of 1700 words and expressions, covering most of the words of high frequency in modern Chinese. And "Supplementary Words" are provided to help students expand their vocabulary through example sentences and reappearances of words.

Yu Miao is a teacher in Beijing International Studies University. As one of the compilers of the multi-media Chinese learning software Interactive Chinese (published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press), he has gained rich experience in compilation of multi-media Chinese teaching materials.