Background
I recently decided to learn Mandarin but I work full-time and my schedule isn't flexible enough where I would be able to take night courses, so I set out to teach myself (with the help of my girlfriend, a native speaker). I looked up several books on Amazon and cross referenced them to local universities to see which were "tried and true" for college level learning. The Integrated Chinese series appeared to be widely used so I purchased the level 1 part 1 textbook and workbook.Book Structure
There are 10 chapters and each chapter is broken down into two sub-chapters that are identical in structure. Each sub-chapter begins with a dialogue that introduces that new words and grammar rules. Next you are presented with a vocabulary list of new words which generally will consist of 10-20 new words. After the vocab list comes the new grammar rules followed by practice exercises. Each chapter has a theme such as hobbies, traveling, family, etc.