"Bridge to China is a new, four-Part Mandarin Chinese primer series for today's North American college and high school students. The series opens with an introduction to Pinyin, the Chinese phonetic alphabet, which optimizes students' ability to speak successfully as they learn. the first two books are for beginning students and emphasize pronunciation, listening, and speaking. Book 2 also incorporates reading skills. Books 3 and 4 target intermediate Mandarin Chinese learners and place equal emphasis on speaking and reading skills. The series offers well-Chosen, high-Interest topics for oral activities, lively situational dialogues, important grammatical structures, and select usages of modern Chinese. It also provides entertaining, culturally informative readings, supplementary vocabulary lists, and two-Way vocabulary glossaries at the end of each book. Extensively class-Tested, Bridge to China integrates the 5 Cs of language learning--Communication, culture, comparisons, connections, and communities. It lays a solid foundation in the target language and successfully prepares students for advanced study. This series can be used in two-Year college programs, four-Year high school programs, and short-Term intensives. XIaozhou Wu earned his Ph.D. at Emory University. Dr. Wu is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Culture at Santa Monica College, where he teaches various levels of the Chinese Language. in addition to teaching, Dr. Wu has led summer programs at Nankai University in China. He is the co-Author of New Century Chinese, a college-Level language text."