Short-term Spoken Chinese is a series of short-term intensive textbooks designed primarily to develop students’ oral communicative competence. Suitable for short-term courses of all levels with a teaching cycle of six weeks or less, it can also be used as a textbook for oral skills courses in general further education programs and as a self-study resource. The series comprises seven volumes across five proficiency levels: Threshold (Volume 1 & Volume 2), Elementary (Volume 1 & Volume 2), Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate, and Advanced. What is presented to learners now is the 4th edition of this textbook series.

Threshold is intended for zero-based learners and beginners. It contains 30 lessons in total. Lessons 1–5 focus on phonetics, forming a self-contained module for optional use. Lessons 6–30 are the core texts, which align with the most frequently used vocabulary and sentence patterns specified in the Elementary Level 1 and Level 2 of the Grading Standards. These lessons cover the most basic communicative tasks in daily life, study, and other communicative activities.

1.The 4th edition has undergone comprehensive revision and optimization to make teaching more effective for instructors and learning more efficient for students.
2.With a focus on short-term intensive training and communication-first principles, it efficiently develops students'oral communicative competence.
3.Practically oriented and emphasizing learning for application, it carefully selects topics related to students'daily lives and enables them to master communicative tasks one by one.
With a unique code per book, it attaches great importance to the development and improvement of textbook resources.

Chief Editor: Ma Jianfei, Compilers: Su Yingxia, Zhai Yan Ma Jianfei is a professor and Secretary-General of the International Confucian Association. He previously served as Vice President of Beijing Language and Culture University(BLCU), and Secretary of the Party Committee and Director of the Center for Language Education and Cooperation of the Ministry of Education. His research mainly focuses on international dissemination and management of Chinese, as well as theories and methods of international Chinese education. Su Yingxia is a professor and Associate Academic Dean of Hainan International College, BLCU. She formerly held the positions of Dean of the College of Applied Chinese Language and Director of the Center for International Communication of Chinese Culture at BLCU. She was elected a Distinguished Teacher of BLCU in 2012. As a Chinese language teaching expert, she has conducted Chinese teacher training programs in many countries. Her research mainly focuses on teac