Méthode d'Initiation à la Langue et à l'Ecriture chinoises (by Joel Bellassen and Zhang Pengpeng) is an elementary Chinese textbook which uses characters as basic units of Chinese. This article presents this textbook and discusses the basic differences about the basic units of Chinese between Bellassen and Zhang's textbook and those counterparts published in China. Mainly this articles dissusses the following four issues: 1. Whether or not we should think about the basic units of a language when we compile a language textbook? 2. The different teaching methods and effects reflected by the character based and word based Chinese textbooks respectively. 3. How the position of words is effected by a character based Chinese structure? 4. The relationship between the teaching method which uses the characters as basic units of Chinese and the style of teaching Chinese.