The Setting Sail with Chinese is a set of Chinese textbooks centered on vocabulary learning. The elementary level consists of two volumes,which is suitable for teenage and adult learners both at home and abroad who have mastered about 500 core words. This set of textbooks can be used as a specialized textbook for vocabulary courses, a self-study book for students, and teaching resources for teachers.

This set of textbooks takes the elementary vocabulary in the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education as the reference standard. By systematically sorting out the vocabulary items one by one and analyzing the relationships among related words, 1,500 words are carefully selected as the main entries. The content of the two volumes is arranged around these 1,500 main words. There are a total of 30 units in the two volumes, with 50 new words in each unit, which are divided into two parts. Each part includes three modules: word presentation, word explanation, and consolidation exercises. The word explanation part contains the pinyin, part of speech, typical collocations, typical example sentences, and related expansions of the target words. For polysemous words, the core meanings are selected and presented item by item.

Su Xiangli, Doctor of Literature, is an associate professor and postgraduate supervisor at Beijing Language and Culture University(BLCU). Her research mainly focuses on Chinese lexicology, lexical typology, contrastive linguistics, and international Chinese language education. Professor Su has presided over several research projects, including those supported by the National Social Science Fund of China, the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of the Ministry of Education, and key projects of the Center for Language Education and Cooperation of the Ministry of Education. She has also participated in more than ten research projects at various levels, such as key projects supported by the National Social Science Fund and major projects of research bases for humanities and social sciences under the Ministry of Education. Meanwhile, she has published more than 30 academic papers and served as the only editor, the chief editor or the co-editor in the compilation of multiple textbooks and dictionaries.

1. Clear Positioning and Strong Relevance: Focusing on vocabulary learning, it carefully selects target words, scientifically screens word meanings, and meticulously sets up typical contexts, which helps learners deeply understand the meanings of words and fully master their usages.

2. Scientific and Reasonable Content Arrangement: It effectively balances the relationship between depth and difficulty. Based on learners’ cognitive abilities and learning patterns, while controlling the difficulty of the meanings and collocation examples of target words, it tries to comprehensively display the combinational and paradigmatic relations of target words as much as possible. This enables learners to achieve in-depth learning of target words and helps them master basic vocabulary more quickly and solidly.

3. Appropriate Expansion to Improve Learning Efficiency through Word Relevance: During the explanation of target words, it appropriately expands on content that has a paradigmatic relation with the target words. For example, from the word “办公室”(office), it brings out words like “教室”(class room), “休息室”(rest room), and “会议室”(meeting room). This helps learners perceive the word-formation rules of Chinese, learn to draw inferences from one instance, and obtain a magic weapon for rapidly increasing their vocabulary.

4. Novel in Form and Powerful in Function: On the left side of each page of the textbook is the teaching content presentation area, which shows the meanings and usages of target words. On the right side is the blank functional area. Teachers can use this area as a preparation zone for lesson planning and flexibly expand relevant learning content according to students’ proficiency levels. Students can use this area as a note-taking zone to record the expanded content in class, their personal learning difficulties, and so on.

It is recommended to be used as a specialized vocabulary textbook independently, an auxiliary textbook for comprehensive courses and other skill courses, or a textbook for students to study on their own.

15 units, with each unit taking 2 to 4 class hours