In this area of the webpage we have posted free material for our students and for all those Chinese language students in general who use the material our school recommends.

Resources list:

• New Practical Chinese Reader
• Reading and Writing Chinese Characters
• Rapid Literacy in Chinese

Most of the resources here have been created by our teachers, whose experience in teaching online impelled them to develop the ideal complementary material to the spoken lessons online and the books used. Our main manual, the New Practical Chinese Reader, is a very complete set that comes with a Workbook, a CD and a DVD . However, we
thought that, in order to get the most out of the lesson, the student should have the chance to correct the exercises by himself ; and not only that, she/he would also need extra help when writing the characters learned in the book. To this end, we have made use of what technology has to offer us, creating tailor-made dictations for those who use this manual.

The Chinese language student already knows that practicing writing Chinese characters is the only way to reach success, and this is why we have borrowed a usual resource used in Primary Schools in China: dictations.

At first, most Chinese language students stumble upon two big obstacles: pronunciation and writing. Nevertheless, since our students take individual lessons in which their teachers constantly correct their pronunciation, writing is usually the bigger problem. This aspect of the language has no secret recipe: what is needed, above all, is perseverance. And yet, its study does not require you to make fruitless attempts based on pure memorization, but approach it in a more structured and logical way.

Some years ago, the mistaken method of teaching how to write the characters used in normal communication frustrated a generation of students. The reason is that basic words required to carry out an adult conversation do not necessarily match the most basic characters. For example, 谢谢 (xiexie), which means “thanks”, is made up of three parts, and each one of them separately has a meaning. Therefore, before teaching this character, if the student is to understand and remember it, one should first show the basic characters that compose that word.

Fortunately, there are now books in the market that teach character writing in a very logical manner, starting with the most basic characters or those that present analogies with recently studied ones. Among these books, we use and recommend the series “Learning Chinese Characters from Ms Zhang” and, especially, “Reading and Writing Chinese Characters” 1 and 2, with their Workbook. Although these books are extremely good, we believe the material developed by our teachers in the form of dictations allows our students to obtain the most from them.

It is quite normal to be unable to learn writing Chinese at the same pace you learn to speak it, just as one cannot pretend to write everything he is able to read. Recognizing Chinese characters is infinitely easier than writing them. For this reason, reading can also be practiced on your own. At the most basic levels, we recommend the book “Rapid Literacy in Chinese”. In order to allow the student to self-assess his progress, we decided to record basic sentences from the book, which can be used as dictations.