About

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. The draft of the first volume of the beginning level was prepared with the assistance of Qiuyu Wang, a Preceptor who then left the Harvard Chinese Language Program after spring 2012. Having received consistently positive feedback from students, I proceeded to expand and revise the first volume and 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. I finished the next two volumes for the advanced-high/superior level with Panpan Gao and Jie Zhao separately in 2016-2017. During 2022-2023, the first eight volumes were revised and expanded to include content, grammar examples, and culture notes that illustrate the use of language and life in Taiwan. The textbooks for the beginning and intermediate heritage levels were originally completed in two volumes in 2022 with the invaluable support of Fangzheng Zhang and Yuxiao Du. Building on this foundation, the materials were enriched and expanded into four volumes in 2025. Thanks to their continued and generous assistance, the first two volumes of the Harvard Chinese Language Series were also thoroughly revised that year to better reflect contemporary issues and lifestyles, and to offer greater diversity and inclusivity in topics, themes, settings, regions, and character representation. With additional assistance from Fangzheng Zhang and Minglei Lin, the grammar, usage, and vocabulary for the pre-advanced and advanced levels were also substantially updated in 2025, tailored to the difficulty and relevance for learners at those proficiency levels. 

Our unique system of teamwork for producing these volumes in tandem over 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. Our general division of labor enabled me to focus on the overall design of the series, the features of each book, themes and topics, vocabulary sections and indices, grammar and usage, culture notes, as well as various updates to these components during field-testing, while my colleagues drafted the texts, produced illustrative examples for each grammar point, and prepared the grammar indices. Without the conscientious work of the entire team of senior instructors, this series would not exist, and I wish to thank each of them for their tireless efforts in this endeavor.