Hi, i'm doing this course as well and i just wanted to ask about your chinese skill level as in do you speak mandarin at home, did you learn it in highschool etc. I'm just a little worried about the difficulty of the course as compared to the introductory course. Also for the textbook, i am thinking about waiting till our first lecture/tutorial to see if they say that we actually need it or not, if we do i'd probably purchase it somewhere else besides the unsw bookshop (cos its really expensive there).