1. Overview of Pronunciation and Pinyin Romanization 1.1. conventions of pinyin 1.2. the structure of the Mandarin syllable 1.3. tones 2. The Syllable and the Word 2.1. meaning and the syllable 2.2. meaning and the word 2.3. tone change in multi-syllable words and phrases 3. The Chinese Writing System: An Overview 3.1. the structure of characters 3.2. stroke order and Chinese dictionaries 3.3. simplified vs. traditional characters 3.4. the character and the syllable 4. Grammatical Categories and Basic Phrase Order 4.1. grammatical categories 4.2. the order of phrases in the Mandarin sentence 5. Nouns: properties of the noun (absence of number and gender distinctions, proper and common nouns, pronouns) 6. Numbers: cardinal, ordinal, numbers in a list, numbers in counting 7. Specifiers 7.1. specifiers as demonstratives 7.2. specifiers and classifiers 7.3. specifiers, numbers and classifiers. 8. Noun Phrases and noun modification 8.1. modification involving numbers or specifiers 8.2. modification with? de modification of a noun by a noun or noun phrase (and possession) modification of a Noun by a stative verb modification of a noun by a verb phrase modification of a noun by a clause missing ? de 8.3.modification with the literary marker of noun modification: ? zhÒ 9. Verbs 9.1. Properties of Mandarin verbs 9.2. Mandarin verb types 9.2.1.. stative verbs (adjectival meaning/verbal properties, intensification of stative verbs, negation of stative verbs) 9. 2.2. achievement verbs (meaning and properties, negation of achievement verbs) 9.2.3. activity verbs (and resultative verb endings, negation of activity verbs) 9.3. Auxiliary verbs 10. Questions: Question words and the structure of questions 11. Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases 12. Adverbs 13. Conjunctions 14. Passive sentences