First Step: An Elementary Reader for Modern Chinese

[philwhite]

I've just stumbled across (on the web) these two new books from Princeton University Press and wondered whether anyone has an opinion on them.

• First Step: An Elementary Reader for Chinese
• First Step: Workbook for Chinese

They are part of the Princeton Language Program: Modern Chinese series and are intended for first year students.

 

"the elementary textbook First Step focuses on the basics of modern Chinese phonetics and grammatical structure to help students with no previous background in the Chinese language to establish practical daily communication."

 

They were both published in March 2014 and, at this time, there are no reviews on Amazon.com and only one review on Amazon UK.

 

Interestingly, looking at the PDF sample of chapter 1, there are QR codes alongside the text which link directly to the free online audio files for the lesson text and vocab. On an Android phone, I could quickly open these with QR Droid^TM but not with QR Code Reader from Scan Inc. These audio files for the text, vocabulary and workbook, could be a useful resource for beginners like me.

 

From the sample chapter 1, the lesson dialogues are given in both Pinyin and English, then a vocabulary section followed by the Simplified Chinese text. At the end of the chapter there are Grammar Notes, Cultural Notes and the lesson text in Traditional Chinese.

[character]

Seems like a nice introductory textbook.  Unfortunately, it looks like many of their Chinese textbooks are called readers, which is now confusing, given the emergence of so many graded readers in the Chinese learning market.