前言 FOREWORD

Basic Chinese for North America Today is the revised version and second edition of my previous textbook Chinese Today. It includes two volumes in two versions：one in French for francophone learners of Chinese, the other one in English for anglophone learners.With the help of Chinese language teaching experts we have implemented several improvements, adapting the teaching material to the most recent developments in language didactics.The specific innovative features of this second edition are as follows：

1.Grammar explanations and notes are available in English to make it easier for learners to understand.

2.We follow a comprehensive communicative approach.Each lesson introduces a different topic, allowing the learner to memorize the new spoken words and phrases, as well as the written Chinese characters.

3.For the frst thirteen lessons, Pinyin phonetics are provided for the main texts in order to help the beginners in learning Chinese characters and making gradual transition to the second half of the textbook.Starting from Lesson Fourteen, the main texts are not given Pinyin.The purpose is to enhance students'ability to recognize the Chinese characters and be in good command of their pronunciations without the assistance of Pinyin.

4.The material includes a Workbook for Basic Chinese for North America Today edited by Hongju Yu and Huijun Zhou, and Supplementary Readings for Basic Chinese for North America Today edited by Helen Xiaoyan Wu.

5.In the printed textbook we devote special attention to explaining cultural differences, as well as specifc language phenomena that appear in communicative contexts between Chinese and English speakers.

6.To help students of Chinese master the tone changes（sandhi）that occur in the words不（bù）and一（yī）in the spoken Chinese language under certain conditions, we modify the tones according to their spoken context, for the beneft of beginning learners.

7.The teaching material includes a compact disk from the Canadian software developers and publishers Asian Languages Software Inc.：with the main functions of the interactive Chinese learning tool KEY, which offers the learner features such as automatically adding traditional Chinese characters, Pinyin text, as well as Chinese/English dictionary lookup of each Chinese word/character occurring in the textbook（details on the full version of the KEY software are available at www.cjkware.com）.

While re-writing and editing the textbook Basic Chinese for North America Today, we received moral and fnancial support from the University of Montreal, from Hanban, and from Education Office of the Chinese Embassy in Canada. We are grateful for their timely and generous contributions.

Despite the authors'efforts, mistakes and errors may have slid into this new edition. We invite the users to report any such problems, in order to improve the quality of future editions.

Hongju Yu

June 14，2016

At Montreal