This is a thorough and expanded revision of Speak Chinese, by M. Gardner Tewksbury (1948), following two decades of classroom use. The twenty-four lessons of the earlier text have been regrouped into twenty, with the original vocabulary of 750 items increased to 850. Use of Speak Chinese disclosed a need for more exercises both for student use in preparing the lesson and for classroom use by the teacher; this revision therefore includes both a Student Workbook and a Teacher's Manual.
The objective of the textbook is to present the basic structural patterns of colloquial Mandarin. The vocabulary is used in a series of dialogues from everyday life. No Chinese characters are used in this text; the Yale romanization is used throughout and the student's attention is concentrated on the new sounds, words, and patterns of the language. The spoken language is written in polysyllabic words, as they are normally spoken, and not as monosyllabic characters, which helps the student to acquire the rhythm of the phrase as well as the pronunciation of the syllable.