Chinese Reading and Writing 1 online video lessons completed!

Great news! Chinese Reading and Writing 1 online video lessons are completed! For people who have studied some Mandarin Chinese and are able to speak a little bit, but do not know how to read or write Chinese, these video lessons are perfect for them to take that first step in learning reading and writing Chinese, not just reading and writing characters, but text.

Based on my textbook Chinese Reading and Writing 1, a total of 18 video lessons have been gradually produced and published. All video lessons are free for all, without any opt in requirement. These online lessons cover the preparation chapter, five lessons in the book, and one final review, teaching strokes and stroke orders, 70 most frequently used Chinese characters, and 150 words and expressions. These are presented straightforwardly in the video.  

Moreover, in the book, there are also 83 sentences, 4 conversations and 1 short paragraph, all written with these 70 characters. These illustrations are to show students how to string the learned Chinese characters together into Chinese texts. To be able to comprehend these Chinese texts is critical for students to build up their Chinese reading and writing skills. After all, we are learning how to read and write Chinese, not how to read and write 70 Chinese characters. 

To prevent from robbing students’ opportunities of reading these texts on their own, I only selected a few for some necessary explanations, drawing word boundaries, the usages of Chinese punctuations, a couple of unavoidable translation errors, and so on. Students are highly encouraged to finish reading all the rest of text, and complete the end-of-chapter challenges by themselves. 

Chinese Reading and Writing 1 is the first book for non-Chinese speakers to learn how to read and write Chinese. After complete this book, students will be able to get the fundamental idea of what Chinese writing system is, the potentialities of Chinese characters, and they will be on the right path to further develop their skills in reading and writing Chinese texts. 

The first video lesson took a long time to produce, I have forgotten how long. It was finally published on December 20, 2019. The last video lesson was the quickest to finish. It took only two days and was published on April 29, 2020. Looking back, I am pretty happy that these four five months were not wasted, especially when we consider the COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge disruptive force that everyone had to deal with. 

I really had fun making these video lessons, and by now I am quite fond of my animation character!