Chinese primary school books

[DeltaS4]

Hello!

I want to learn hanzi through the books used in schools of China but I don't know where can I acquire this sort of books... I already saw a chinese site with books like these but as I don't know hanzi yet I didn't understand which one I should buy!

so if anybody can say me a place where I can buy it and advice me some specific grade book I will be very grateful!

Thanks

[yonglin]

Actually, I'm not convinced that this would be such a terrific idea. I don't know about your spoken Chinese or your age, but primary school textbooks are usually directed at primary school kids with a lot of time at their hands, who already speak Chinese fluently. The pedagogic approach will be completely different from that of learning Chinese as a foreign language.

From my personal experience, what you need is context, not stand-alone characters. The first time I studied Chinese, I had two character classes a week. However, having learnt the basic strokes and the most fundamental character components, I found these entirely useless. In particular, I found it extremely difficult to learn characters from the character book: about 5 times the effort was needed compared to learning characters from my oral textbook (where they were put in context and used in words/sentences).

I know that there are some of people on these forums who believe that you should learn characters first, without context before learning speaking/listening/other things: I'm not one of these, but I guess we all have different learning styles. However, even if you want to focus on learning characters first, I would very much suggest that you pick up a book written for foreigners on the topic. It will just make things a lot easier for you. There are plenty of book lists lurking around these forums...

And if you think that all that I've said up till now was crap, you might want to have a look in any Chinese shop around where you live (if any). If they sell any books at all, they WILL sell those ones (for overseas Chinese to teach their kids to read and write). You could buy them online, as well, but postage would be expensive (compared to the low price of the book), and I can't think of any online bookstore selling books from the Mainland but which is not in Chinese.

[elina]

My son is in grade one in a primary school, the books were bought by his school, I have heard someone in his class lost his textbooks, and they bought from 花市书店 and 东单教育书店 again:

http://www.hs-book.com/List/?searchType=bookName&searchValue=%e8%af%ad%e6%96%87

My son’s 语文 textbook is published by 人民教育出版社.

[Tom Higgins]

They're sold in most major bookstores. Just check out the "辅导教材" (supplementary educational materials) section.

[DeltaS4]

I'm sixteen and I'm using ChinesePod to learn spoken Chinese. As I listened to ChinesePod lessons I found that it will be better to learn the hanzi first and then the pinyin, because the spoken words seemed to be impossible to write using pinyin. From my experience on learning the Japanese alphabets I think that the best way to memorize a character is writing it following the correct stroke order...

So I think that if I learn by listening to ChinesePod lessons and write the words I already knew from these primary books it will be nice...

Chinese shops don't sell these books here, I just found a Chinese dictionary after a long day of looking at Chinese shops!

Anyway, what do you think that will be better for me under these circumstances?

Elina, thanks! I just don't know how to buy in that online store because I can't read hanzi yet...