What is a good curriculum to quickly improve in Chinese?

What is a good curriculum to follow to quickly improve in Chinese?

• My company in China will be giving me 2-3 one-on-one Chinese classes a week taught by an HR person. The instructor is Chinese & majored in English in a Chinese university.  She speaks decent English but has no experience teaching Chinese to foreigners. I can speak enough Chinese to get by day-to-day and can read maybe 400-500 characters, learned almost entirely through day-to-day use & self-study (especially with Anki).  Without having taken the test, I'd put my level at maybe a high 2 or low 3 HSK, except that I can't write in Chinese by hand at all. Part of my (& my company's) motivation is to make me more effective in my mostly-Chinese-speaking workplace. I see this as a great opportunity for some serious improvement. Are there any strategies anyone can share to make the most of it? I plan to ask to be taught writing & basic grammatical structures to start off with & avoiding vocabulary lessons (I can memorize vocab words on my own time).  Anything else I should pay attention to? Can anyone recommend a curriculum or textbook I can give my instructor to follow?

• Answer:

  I have taught workplace English before. We usually dealt with vocabulary and situations students were dealing with on a day to day basis. I think it would be much more advantageous to focus on workplace vocabulary and situations with your tutor, rather than textbooks that might not relate. If you do that, you'll use what you learn right away and it will be reinforced faster. If you don't want to go over the vocabulary with your tutor, at least get them to help you by making vocabulary lists that are relevant to your work. Then you can study these alone with Anki, Memrise, or Quizlet. (But your teacher can come up with scenarios for you to use these words also - you could do role plays). If it were me (and from what you describe, our Chinese level is similar), I would use a large portion of the time to learn to read and spend the whole time conversing in Chinese about what you're reading. You can ask for documents from work that you might have to deal with and try to go over those. Make a request of the teacher to help you come up with these materials. Good luck. ...................... EDIT: I'm moving my comment to the answer based on the OP's comment. I happen to like the Integrated Chinese series of textbooks. I used those when I started taking classes again and they were pretty comprehensive. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887276709/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0887274609&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0BRXNQKKPKCPB7EQVHY6 But they are expensive! Most textbooks are though. Also, there are others I'd recommend for learning to read characters better. Did you ever get a good grounding in characters? Radicals, etc.? I didn't, so I had to start almost from the beginning. I would recommend Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters for that:http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Lea... and then Skritter. Skritter is worth it and they'll have an iPod app soon.