In this parallel character version of Beginning Chinese, dialogues, pronunciation drills, sentence-building exercises, substitution drills and memorization exercises correspond to the same lessons Beginning Chinese offers in English and in pinyin romanization of Mandarin.

This character version of Beginning Chinese has been prepared for use by both students and teachers. It can function as the starting point in the study of Chinese, as an introduction to characters after the same material has been mastered in transcript form, or as a supplement to Beginning Chinese Reader. (The latter, now in preparation, is designed specifically as a reader and hence is based on quite different principles.)