A message from Jennifer Liu

Director of the Chinese Language Program at Harvard

This textbook series is the culmination of a project that I first undertook in 2012 to address the need for a set of up-to-date, comprehensive, systematic learning tools to guide Chinese language learners in developing proficiency. I wrote the first volume of the beginning level together with Qiuyu Wang, a Preceptor in the Harvard Chinese Language Program. Having received consistently positive feedback from students after two years of field-testing, I proceeded to write the second volume of the beginning level on my own, and the next six volumes of the series together with Kang Zhou, Jie Ying, and Panpan Gao, the CLP course heads for, respectively, the intermediate, pre-advanced, and advanced course levels, during 2014-2016. The volumes for the advanced-high/superior level was completed with Panpan Gao and Jie Zhao separately in 2016-2017, and the last two volumes for the beginning and intermediate heritage level was finished with the help of Fangzheng Zhang and Yuxiao Du in 2022.

Our unique system of teamwork for producing these volumes in tandem over the course of a decade has enabled the content of the series, including vocabulary and grammar points, to be modified, expanded, and shifted between different lessons and levels to find the most appropriate place to introduce each item. The close coordination among our team of veteran instructors as they worked on their respective volumes also means that every component of the series has been scrutinized from an array of pedagogical perspectives, and each volume links up seamlessly with the preceding and subsequent ones.