schaum's outlines chinese grammar - worth a look

[lazyboy]

this book provides a nice overview of mandarin grammar. it says that it goes through the grammar covered in the first 2/3 semesters in a typical college course.

for those of you who want a handy reference or want to pump up your grammar (which can be done much easier than vocab, in my opinion). the advantage to this is that you can use your vocab more creatively and this might help you build your vocab.

the explanations use linguistics-speak a fair bit, so it might frustrate those learning mandarin as a first foreign language and never systematically studied english (or didnt pay attention in middle school, count me in there) and never learned the parts of a sentence.

however, i think it would still be worth it because the book has GREAT examples and exercises that walk you through the grammar points. it also has a progressive structure that builds on itself in terms of sentence structure and vocab.

i bought this book a year or so ago when i was just playing around with learning mandarin, but i came back to it recently after going through pimsleur 1 and 2 and rosetta stone 1.

i am an elementary student of mandarin, but an experienced hand at learning a tough language - ive been doing korean almost 5 years off and on. this includes 1.5 years of full-on intensive study 40 hrs a week, and recently 6 mo in korea (w/ some quite dead spots in between)

for those who refuse (or claim to) to look at english when learning a foreign language, this will not be your cup of tea. for me though, i am a quite analytical learner, and i like to get a snapshot of the larger picture of where i am going instead. i dont like to always be passive and only absorb what i learn through digesting materials, and especially i dont like waiting for the teacher/ course to "wait for the right time" to spoon feed me another bit of grammar. call me wierd. i actually LIKE grammar (a further caveat would be that I took a linguistics course in college, and that did help when i used this book)

i used this book to absorb (to a great extent) the structure of just about anything i would want to say at the intermediate level (for me advanced study is mostly just vocab anyway). now i will continue to digest as much material as possible to reinforce and build what i have been exposed to by studying this book.