Review of Step by Step Chinese: Elementary Chinese Characters (I) (Chinese-English)

[Hofmann]

This is a review of Step by Step Chinese: Elementary Chinese Characters (I) (Chinese-English) by Yi Hongchuan ( 易洪川, 2006), ISBN 9787802001244. I received this book as a participant in a giveaway.

 

tl;dr: Good information, but impossible or very difficult to use.

 

I think it's reasonable to assume that someone picking up this book cannot read Chinese characters, and expects to learn from this book. The book is organized in a series of lessons, each with

• a vocabulary list, with pronunciation in Pinyin, a Chinese definition, and an English definition,
• a main text, using only words from the vocabulary list,
• some information about Chinese characters, and
• some exercises

According to the editor's notes, they have prioritized high-frequency characters and vocabulary in their texts. That is good. Character information also seems to be useful, but nothing more than what you would find on Wikipedia...but I guess not all of you can access that.

 

The exercises seem relevant enough as the lessons progress.

 

There is one main problem though: There is too much essential information written in Chinese. The the table of contents, section labels, the sections of information about Chinese characters in each lesson, exercise instructions, and exercise prompts are all in Chinese, using characters that are not in the vocabulary list. Yes, there is a glossary in the back, but it's a Chinese-Chinese gloss. Furthermore, in all Chinese glosses, including in the vocabulary lists, they break the first rule of defining words: Don't use the word in the definition of the word, e.g. don't define "學" as "學習," as on page 8. In a best case scenario, the reader would be completely proficient in Chinese but illiterate. Most likely, they don't know very much Chinese, which means they will have quite a tough time reading this book, even if all characters and words were defined in front of them. But they aren't. Without English glosses, the reader's only other option is using OCR on their device, if they have that. If they don't they'll have to resort to other character lookup methods, if they even know how to do that.

 

I know Sinolingua can afford an English-proficient translator. At the same time, get a copy editor so you don't define 有 as "to has" like on page 8. We don't all speak LOLspeak yet.

 

Another thing: That whole 易五碼 scheme seems useless. Anybody with the patience to learn to look things up with it can just as easily use a Kangxi or first-thing-written+strokes scheme.

 

I know what this book is trying to do, but if you want to learn about Chinese characters, you're better off just reading this page, following links to relevant articles, especially those in the Chinese Characters sidebar. If you're aurally and orally proficient, but illiterate, then download an Anki deck and/or get something like Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton and Li Ying (ISBN 978-0804832069 for Traditional, 978-0804835091 for Simplified).

[Sinolingua]

Thank you for giving your kind comments about the book Step by Step Chinese:Elementary Chinese Characters(1). We appreciate your all your reply and advises.

Advanced and profecially, the book Step by Step Chinese series designed for the high level in Chinese and the characters all selected with the difficult ones and have the less English glosses. But your advice about the defination of the words and the 易五碼 scheme are useful to us and I will forward all the problems to our editor to revise the better one when the book is to be revised in future.Thanks agian for attenting this activities and giving us your opinion about the books. Hope you could fucuse on more books published by us. Best

[Hofmann]

the book Step by Step Chinese series designed for the high level in Chinese and the characters all selected with the difficult ones and have the less English glosses.

Those who can read Chinese glosses probably don't need to learn the 900 most frequent characters.