功夫

Book excerpt: The Kung Fu series, a set of learning material on the Chinese language, is the product of collaborative efforts of experts from mainland China, Hong Kong and the U.S. It aims at providing texts and exercises that will have fresh and accurate language, communicate effectively with an international audience, have clear and orderly structural explanations, and contain a good number of contextual, task-based exercises for stimulating students to higher levels of fluency. "Kung Fu" (I) is the first volume in the series and is meant to satisfy the requirements of an elementary Chinese program. There are twenty-two lessons in total, each including: lesson text in Chinese characters; vocabulary, with contextual examples for selected entries; supplementary vocabulary; grammar notes: points of structure are explained fully, with adequate contextual examples as reinforcement; phrases and sentences, a series of phrases and complete declarative, imperative, interrogative, or exclamatory sentences for drill reinforcement of new material; lesson text in pinyin romanization; lesson text in English translation; task-based classroom activities; and reading comprehension for selected lessons. These twenty-two lessons are preceded by eight that systematically cover the sound structure of Putonghua and introduce expressions routinely used in class. A separate Student Exercise Manual is also available for use by students outside class. The manual is designed to be used in conjunction with the Kung Fu textbook. It contains two types of material for use by students outside class: (1) Chinese script introduction and practice and (2) exercises on material introduced in each lesson of the Kung Fu(I)text. The Kung Fu exercises are self-explanatory. Chinese writing material includes: the standard simplified version of characters introduced in each lesson; stroke-by-stroke break down of each newly introduced character; the radical, or indicator, of each character; the traditional form of the character in the far right column, should it differ from the simplified; and a gridded page for writing practice once correct stroke order has been learned.