ABSTRACT
Learn vocabulary and characters. If you don’t know the words in a lesson, you can’t ■ participate in class and you cannot do the homework. You need to begin each lesson by learning the new vocabulary and characters. Regularly review vocabulary and characters from earlier lessons. Use the resources provided with this course to help you study. Download the character practice sheets from the course website to practice writing characters. Pay attention to the stroke order presented on the practice sheets so that you learn to write characters correctly. Using the same stroke order each time you write a character helps you to remember the character. Conversely, if you write a character differently each time you write it, your brain will have a hard time remembering it. Use the vocabulary and character flash cards on the website to help you review vocabulary and characters, but be sure to write down your responses in Chinese to make sure that you really know the tones in each vocabulary item, or the correct way to write each character. Learn the structures. Notice that most of the ■ Focus on Structure exercises refer to a specific Use and Structure note. Read the Use and Structure note before you do the exercise, and follow the model sentences in the note as you complete your work. Work through the Sentence Pyramids in the textbook to see how phrases are built up into sentences in Chinese. Use the Sentence Pyramids to test yourself, translating the Chinese column into English and checking your answers, and then translating the English column into Chinese. Work through the Structure Drills on the website to practice new structures on your own. Use the listening resources. If you could understand a sentence or narrative in Chinese ■ the first time you heard it, you wouldn’t need to study Chinese. Do not expect to understand listening files on your first try. Instead, listen to the same texts over and over again in order to train your brain to understand what it hears. When you work on the Listening for Information exercises, expect to listen to each ‘clip’ multiple times until you are sure that you understand it. Help your brain to focus on information by reading the instructions and the answer choices before you listen. The Structure Drills provided on the website will exercise your listening skills as they increase your control of new structures and vocabulary. Communicate through reading and writing. Many of the exercises in this section ■ require you to read or write longer passages in Chinese. Before you read, identify the sentence structures so that you know how words and phrases in the text are related. Identify word boundaries so that you group characters correctly, and look for connecting words that tell you if the text is presenting a sequence, or a description, or an explanation, etc. Before you write, think of what you want to say, and jot down the Chinese structures that you can use to express your meaning. Think of how you want to organize your ideas, and make a list of the connecting words or structures you need for the
organization you are planning. After you write, proofread your work. Be sure to write characters where you have learned them, and be sure that the characters you write are correct. When reading or writing, if you cannot remember a character or a vocabulary item, use this as an opportunity to review.
