New Concept Chinese, a series of Chinese textbooks for adults, is suitable for both self-teaching and classroom teaching. Observing the principle of making Chinese easier to learn , this series presents practical, concise and interesting teaching materials and employs easy, flexible and effective teaching methods so that students and teachers could learn and teach Chinese in a convenient and effective way. The design of New Concept Chinese follows three principles, namely practical , easy and scientific . 1. Practical (1) Common situations: The situations selected are common in everyday life, such as ordering food, shopping, asking the way and making an invitation. (2) Frequently used expressions: The expressions selected are frequently used in everyday life, such as those used to make an introduction, a phone call or an apology, to thank someone and to talk about the weather. (3) Communicative activities: There is a communicative activity in the review lesson in each unit to train the students ability to put into practice what they have learned. 2. Easy (1) Interesting content: The texts, being fun and humorous, displays the charm of Chinese language, characters and culture step by step. (2) Short texts: The texts are short ones, each of which can be finished within one hour, making students feel a continuing sense of achievement constantly. (3) Humorous cartoons: Each text is illustrated by a series of cartoons, making it much more fun to learn Chinese. 3. Scientific (1) Well-arranged layout: The new words, grammar points and Chinese characters are arranged in a scientific and reasonable way based on the regularity in learning Chinese. (2) Step-by-step progression: Functional topics are presented progress from greeting to shopping and then to seeing a doctor , and Chinese characters from single-element ones to compound ones. - from Amzon