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Rating: 
Summary: A superb textbook for classroom-based Chinese courses
Review: Having studied (Mandarin) Chinese for some years - beginning with a full-time intensive course that went on for several months - I've acquired a lot of Chinese learning materials. Out of all these, however, I think that NEW CHINESE 300 is one of the most effective textbooks for groups.What makes NEW CHINESE 300 remarkable is that it manages to pack a great deal of the Chinese language into less than 400 pages, without throwing out sufficient explanation for the reader. Plenty of examination of the student's skill also abounds; a teacher utilising the book's drills to their fullest could bring a class to significant fluency very quickly. NEW CHINESE 300 starts off with an ideal introduction to the language. Students are introduced to the phonetic system of Chinese - syllables can consist of an initial, vowel, and final - which has been neglected in many recent textbooks. Then the book makes the student learn the writing system as soon as he or she is given Chinese vocabulary, resulting in an impressive command of a couple of hundred ideographs by the end of the course. And to top it all of, the book is a superb value. I don't want to gush too much, as the book is not without its faults. It would be nice if it was easier to cover up the pinyin transliteration that accompanies each dialog sentence given in Chinese characters, so that the reader can concentrate on reading only characters. Also, NEW CHINESE 300 is best when it is used in a structured classroom course. For the self-teaching student, it could be helpful but would seem rather daunting to most. I earnestly recommend taking a look at NEW CHINESE 300 to any Chinese teacher looking for a textbook.
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