recommendations?

[channamasala]

So if you were going to be trapped in the USA for six months or so and needed to start re-learning characters in that time (I started it but wasn't sure how go to about doing it), and also wanted a higher-level textbook for grammar/vocabulary/speaking in general that might take off from where "Colloquial Chinese for Beginners" (Kan Qian) leaves off, what would you go ahead and buy? I'll also be looking for a decent grammar reference. I was lucky with my first textbook - I bought what looked the most appealing and my instincts were right. I don't want to get stuck paying too much for a crap textbook, since it's all I'll have to work on my Chinese for a very long time.

[roddy]

For Characters, have a look at the Easy Way to Learn Chinese Characters book on my textbooks page (http://www.roddyflagg.34sp.com/textbooks.html

it takes you up to several hundred characters, and is very good for giving you an eye for the structure and components of characters, which leaves you in a very good position to continue learning them independently.

I don't know if you can get it outside of China, but maybe you could pick it up on the way out.

Roddy

[channamasala]

I liked the description of athe Chinese character book you mentioned. Right now what I've got is an excellent reference book - "Reading and Writing Chinese". Red, black and white cover. Got it in Hong Kong but I have seen it in the USA. But it is a reference book at heart and besides teaching a few radicals, does nothing to really help one remember what goes where and why. Descriptions are helpful, but I just couldn't use it.

I noticed that you mentioned that text followed by vocabulary, grammar and exercises is "out of date" - that book itself probably is, but the book I've got now has that format and I love it. Then again, I learn the vocabulary before I read the dialogue and instead use the text as a memory aid, and then take sentences from it that I don't understand and either figure them out for myself or email Julian (coworker in Guiyang whose Chinese is years - literally - ahead of mine).

I also have "Teach Yourself Chinese", but after "Teach Yourself Sanskrit" was a miserable failure for me (I just went out and got a tutor instead), I'm afraid to crack it. I'll probably pick it up when I finish with my current textbook ("Colloquial Chinese for Beginners", which, I will repeat, I really like...I can't give it a better endorsement than "I taught myself Chinese from this book") and need something to fill up my last month in China or to look at on my way home.

A book I've seen in the USA that is similar to Easy Way to Learn Chinese Characters is...damn it, I forget the name. But it's easy. It's got the same basic structure - it'll teach you, say, the character for "wood", explain that this is also the "wood" radical and then teach you some other characters that incorporate it (bed, forest, etc). You go through a few blogs of these and then have some exercises. It also, if I remember, explains why the parts of the character are where they are. That's all I remember - it was my senior year roommate's textbook, not mine. Although he never did actually learn Chinese...

[roddy]

The Teach Yourself Books are very very variable. I think for the more obscure languages they just pull a text out of the library and put a new cover on it. I had a TY Catalan, and it was undoubtably the worst textbook ever. Lesson one had you translating sentences like 'Men and women have two arms' and 'cats and dogs are animals', and then you progressed onto things like 'You are completely right, Mr President', and 'They sat there, watching the bank'.

The sentences were so random I just went to the answers at the back and wondered where they'd thought them up from. 'When he was young, he was so hardy, he used to sleep outside all night, even in winter' was another. I got to Chapter 7 and gave up when I realised I couldn't tell people what my name was.

However, the Chinese one is excellent, and I can say 'I taught myself Chinese from that book'.

Roddy

[Guest pratyeka]

Teach yourself Thai was OK, but actually all Thai books suck in comparison to this wacky one I got a photocopy of in a secondhand bookshop .. its called "Essential Thai : A guide to the basics of the Thai Language", and it's bloody brilliant. (I had previously used about 4 different books, TY included).

[channamasala]

TY Sanskrit was hilariously bad. It started with devanagiri (the alphabet) but didn't actually show you how one might go about making the letters on your own. The pictures of the letters were so small that I later found out I had half of them wrong. After that it jumped straight to direct (no transliteration) translation of impossible sentences without helping you with simple things like, say, how to conjugate a verb or where (or what) the pronoun might be. I'm not sure where the writers of the old book actually expected you to get that information. I wish I could remember those sentences, but I know somewhere in the beginning I was expected to directly translate a verse from the Ramayana ("And thus Rama slew Ravana and in so doing, won back Sita, his fair and lovely wife, virtuous still although her long captivity upon the jungle-heavy island of Lanka had shaken her to her feminine core, and she was silent as a lovely fawn, as a radiant young wife should accordingly act..."or something like that).

I also still cannot tell anyone my name in Sanskrit, then again, why would I ever need to?

Roddy's sentences remind me of New Concept English's idea of "beginner's English" - we were given this textbook to teach from, and after one weekend of hell, I threw the it a window. Oddly enough, someone stole it. I have to wonder who would ever want to steal that thing. For example, in Book One ("First Things First"), vocabulary given included:

trousers

blouse

hosiery

umbrella

coat check

department store

sales rep

keyboard operator

cooker (as in a stove...a STOVE people. It's a damn STOVE)

customs officer (for all those six-year olds who need to communicate in English as they leave China, which is so easy to do)

tourist

Norwegian

Dutch

Volvo

Peugueot (I don't even know where to begin with this one. First off, I'm a good speller and *I* can't even spell that. Secondly, it's a BRAND NAME that I've never even seen in China, thirdly, it's NOT ENGLISH!!)

tending the garden

and my favorites:

whisky

beer

tobacco

cigarettes

wine

...you know, for all those times when grammar school kiddies go out for a few cold ones after a long day at Zunyi Number Ten Primary School, and so they can easily purchase tobacco products afterwards.

Words that are NOT taught:

we

they

it

this

that

the verb "to have"

most body parts, foods, and animals

any word related to things a child might want or ask for

any word that might describe something in simple terms (except "grey", which was included in some sentence about purchasing - yes, purchasing - grey hosiery.)

Some "useful phrases":

I like beer, but I don't like whisky.

Jane and Sue are keyboard operators.

Volvos are German but Peugueots are French.

I would like to check my umbrella, please.

I like the taste of cigars.

[Guest sjj17]

Hi

Just reading people saying that the text followed by vocab and grammar and questions etc. is out of date. Can somebody explain the difference between the out of date types of textbooks and the modern textbooks. I am using Practical Chinese Reader because the style suits me and it had excellent reviews on amazon.com, added to the fact that the only textbooks with any English in them that you can get here are for economics and business studies. What sort of layout do the newer style ones have and why is that considered better?

Thanks

Sarah

[channamasala]

Sarah,

I personally don't think that format is out of date. I've never used the textbook you're using, but mine is the same idea. A dialogue, a list of new words that help you to read the dialogue on your own in pinyin, grammar notes, exercises. My complaints with it are that the exercises are too easy and that less than halfway through, English translations of the dialogues stop coming afterwards. They give you translations instead in characters that you are supposed to then learn to read/write (ha!). The English is still there, at the back. I guess this is to keep you from becoming dependent on them.

[Guest joe_doufu]

I just bought a book in the Beijing Friendship Store called "A Key to Chinese Speech and Writing" by frenchmen named Joel Bellassen and Zhang Pengpeng. I don't think it would be a good introduction to Chinese, it moves much too fast through the material. However, it is a great book for learning and re-learning characters, for somebody who is already somewhat good with Chinese. It comes in two volumes and by the end of both you know 900 characters which make up 88% of chinese writing.