primary choice to begin your Chinese learning with. Altogether there are three volumes, each of which is divided into two volumes. The first two are used in the first semester, the third used in the second semester. The course is divided into three stages: the phonetic stage  for  developing  the  pronunciation  skills  and  learning  common characters, the grammar stage for developing simple communication skills through conversations, and the lexical stage for expanding vocabulary through essays reading, and developing the ability to express themselves. Grammar, words and sentences are put into the real life situations. The textbook consists of six parts: text, new word, explanatory notes , grammar , pronunciation and exercises, containing 100 texts and 3,300 new words in all. Since the publication in 1999, Chinese Course has been receiving warm welcome from the learners and teachers. To meet the increasing needs for the book, it was revised and published again with the joint efforts of the author and the Beijing Language and Culture Universtiy Press.Based on the original frame, the revised edition reduced the number of lessons from 100 to 76, and the degree of difficulty is lowered to enable it to be finished within one year. Outdate texts are deleted, and the contents are revised to make the book timely. The explanations of language points are also modified, and the order is rearranged to make it more convenient for teaching.

　　Yang Jizhou, a professor in Beijing Language and Culture University, has been engaged in teaching and research on Chinese as a foreign language and in compilation of TCFL textbooks for a long time. His papers include “The Sequencing of Grammatical Items at the Elementary Stage of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language” and “Several Points in the Compilation of Elementary Chinese Textbooks”, and so on. He has published such textbooks and reference books as Program for the Elementary Stage of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Chinese Course, Climbing- Intermediate Chinese Course, 1700 Pairs of Chinese Common Word Usages, etc.