This document provides an introduction to greetings and basic sentence structures in Mandarin Chinese. It includes common greetings like "Ni hao" meaning "Hello" and sample question and statement patterns using words like "shi" meaning "is", "ma" meaning "?", and "ne" meaning "and how about you?". It demonstrates how to form questions and negatives and uses the adverb "ye" meaning "also". The document is the first lesson of an IVC Chinese course taught by instructor Joanne Chen in 2014.