This textbook, The World of Chinese, is specially designed for foreign learners with primary knowledge of the Chinese language and is aimed at improving their Chinese communication proficiency by way of learning Chinese in real language situations, while helping them acquire a deep understanding of the unique beauty of Chinese culture. In general, this textbook has the following salient features:
    
Real Situation and Rich Content
This textbook, as a whole, is a play describing the work and life of a Chinese American journalist Mali, who returns to China to work for the magazine The World of Chinese. Arranged in 50 episodes, it relates the stories of six main characters, and presents a true, ail-around picture of the everyday life of ordinary Chinese people, concerning clothing, food, housing, transport, social life, and customs. Learners may use this textbook to study everyday Chinese language, folk customs, and rich culture hidden in the Chinese script and then apply what they have learned in daily communication.
    
Progressive Improvement
As a textbook for teaching oral Chinese, The Worm of Chinese has designed different language learning focal points according to different situations in daily life. While giving oral exercises, it also explains basic sentence patterns and the interesting culture hidden in the Chinese script. On the principle of gradual improvement, the textbook has designed situational language training exercises and grammar exercises from easy to difficult. Meanwhile, repeated basic sentence pattern exercises in different situations further strengthen learners' memorization and understanding.
   
Interesting Plot and Humorous Language
The plot of the play is dramatic, its characters lifelike, and its language humorous. These features will certainly arouse learners' enthusiasm for Chinese. At the same time, annotations are given to the texts as well as relevant English translations. Users of this textbook will find them very helpful in the pre-class study and after-class review.
    
Easy-to-use Textbook
In the course of teaching, the focus of teaching changes according to the demands of students, and that requires a textbook to be flexible and open. The World of Chinese emphasizes the teaching concept of learners being the center, and provides teachers with an open system, giving room for teachers to freely apply their teaching ability to the full. Each part of the system can be used flexibly. For example, the textbook and the DVDs may be used together or separately, and teachers may expand the teaching content or reduce it accordingly.
    
This set of textbook includes two volumes and six DVDs. Each lesson in the textbook includes the following parts of introduction, text, notes, words and phrases, comprehension, important grammar and sentence patterns, let's do it now, comprehensive exercises, and each episode on the DVDs consists of four parts of introduction, play, common communication words, and the Chinese script appreciation. Teachers may use the textbooks as the main teaching material and the DVDs as auxiliary. It is suggested that each lesson take 4-6 class hours. However, teachers and self-taught learners may arrange their own timetables according to their own needs.
    
At present, functional audiovisual teaching materials for teaching Chinese as a second language are becoming mature. In the course of our compilation work, we have made bold experiments on the basis of the experience of our predecessors. Of course, this textbook is not without errors and oversights. We sincerely hope that teachers and learners will kindly share any comments and suggestions with us so that we may make further improvements.