There are two main pillars of this beginner 1 course: the pinyin system for pronunciation and the basic radicals for recognizing the most frequently used Chinese characters. Students are to practice pinyin until they can record what they hear in Chinese and turn them into characters in a machine-assisted application for recognition. In this regard, mastering basic radicals help students choose right words. The main goal of the course is to lay a solid foundation for further Chinese learning.

In this course, students will expand vocabulary, acquire basic sentence structures and patterns, and learn new expressions and grammatical points through repeating the key words in the texts and applying them to communicative situations. The course is designed for students to recognize more Chinese characters and their related vocabulary. Social media such as WeChat and WhatsApp are used to input pinyin and then choose targeted words, in order to increase students’ recognition speed and accuracy of Chinese characters.