Chinese 300 has been designed to help students who take short courses in Chinese. It may be used either as a basic textbook or as a drill book for listening and speaking by the beginners or those who have mastered about 1,000 Chinese words.

The book focuses on everyday conversational Chinese and is task-oriented. Students will be able to speak as they learn and gradually improve their listening and speaking abilities.

The 30 lessons cover as completely as possible every situation that a foreigner living in China may encounter. Each lesson consists of five parts: 10 basic sentences, substitution drills, dialogues, English equivalents of new words, and supplementary words and expressions. For the convenience of the beginners, all the basic sentences, new and supplementary words and expressions are provided with their equivalents in English.

The 300 sentence patterns selected include basic sentence patterns and will help students learn the rules of the Chinese language, in addition to conversational usage.