The need for a modern text to teach Chinese to English-speaking students has long been recognized. Even today Chinese tends to be taught by rote rather than concept for the want of pedagogically sophisticated course materials. Jennifer Liu and Margaret Yan, two Indiana University professors, have now produced a cognitively based first year course for learning Chinese. The innovative features of their texts include. * An introduction to the cultural and social contexts of Chinese * A presentation of Chinese calligraphy * Lessons with real-life situations and lively dialogue * Explanations of Chinese pronunciation and grammar * Illustrations including cartoons * Chinese characters with mnemonic visuals * Criteria-grouped vocabulary * An instructorOs manual * Student workbook
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Most helpful customer reviews
I bought this book today, as recommended by my girlfriend who is a Taiwan native. Meeting her in June of 2001, I became interested in learning the Chinese language. This would be my second foray into attempting to learn a foreign languge, as my first one, was back in the spring of 2001 with the Russian language.
As before, I went to bookstores, and looked and studied the different methods available. I found what I thought were some good methods, but thought I would wait until she came to visit me so she could advise me of the best one.
She came here over X-Mas, and we looked at many books in the bookstores. This is the only one she recommended.
Now, I cannot rate it just yet, but I will give it 5 stars based on her recommendation.
She chose it because she felt that it had the best presentation of the traditional and simplified characters, their pinyin pronunciation, and explanatory meanings. And she liked the fonts.
It is so fascinating in trying to learn a new language. It makes you think, about how did you learn your native language in the first place. In my first attempt to learn a new language, the Russian language, I was faced with some soul searching about this. I realized that aural assimilation and imitation, was probably the earliest learning method. Then, the study of the written character and alphabet, and word formation, then grammar.
So, probably no one method can cover it all, but a combination of methods would be comprehensive.
I guess it depends on your agenda and time frame.
I had purchased the "Chinese Now" by Transparent Language, I thought it was a good aural and imitation learning program, but my girlfried didn't like it. One thing I realized, is that it doesn't show you characters, only pinyin equivalent pronunciations.
Anyway sorry for rambling on, but I will let you know more after my studies, on how this particular book works out for me!
By Stacie
I'm going to be living in China in the coming year, and I was hoping to use this text as a means to get some knowledge of the language beforehand. I will be living in Beijing, where the simplified characters are popular. In contrast to the previous review, I found distinguishing the simplified characters from the traditional to be quite difficult, and I'm somtimes left to wonder if they are even there at all.
It is also not set up in a very easy to learn format: they start you out from the beginning with entire dialogues in Chinese characters (albeit, they then repeat the conversations in Pinyin and English) so they don't offer much in the form of grammar instruction, just jumbles of words with no explaination as to why or how the sentence is structured in that way.
One last qualm: The workbook has many activities involving the tapes for the books (which are not included, and I wouldn't even know where to find).
As a plus, it does give you the selected characters in each chapter with the number for each stroke, in addition to aides for remembering the meaning. It also offers a section on Chinese culture at the end of each chapter.
All in all, this would be a good book for use in the classroom with a teacher who would be able to answer your questions.
I think this book is great. Each dialog is given four times. Once each in traditional writing, simplified writing, pinyin, and English. This really helps in learning to read. Each chapter has the same set of sections. Some of the sections are on:
The dialog
Vocabulary
How to write characters, including stroke order.
Culture.
Explanation of grammar. I find these very helpful.
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3.8 out of 5 stars
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