Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar [Paperback]

Now, two minor complaints. First, if the authors were to prepare
a new edition, I wish they had used page space a bit more
economically. It seems that by slightly tightening spacing
between the words in the examples, many examples that
now stretch to 2 or 3 lines could be compressed into one or two.
Doing this could significantly reduce the page count.

Or, even better, the freed space could be used to give
parallel text in Hanzi (Chinese characters) next to each
example. One would think that with moder typesetting that
would not be too complicated, unlike in 1981, when the book
first appeared. While Hanzi are not strictly necessary --
tone marks and Englsih translation of every word allows one to
look any word in a dictionary -- printing them next to the
examples would provide additional visiual cues to those
readers who already know their characters, and an additional
opportunity to learn useful characters (e.g., the three
different "-de" suffixes) "by osmosis" to those who are still
learning.

Instead, it's good background reading on the "why's" of the language after you already know the "how to's". For example, you can read the chapter on aspect and gain a deeper understanding of the logic of why certain sentences work and others don't and where the subtleties lie. For this book is more of a scholarly, systematic analysis of Mandarin grammar than a "teach yourself" guide.

Li and Thompson are progressive rather than conservative in what they accept as sayable. Some sentences I've never come across in my several years of learning Mandarin. So I'm not surprised that some native speakers have called the grammar in this book wrong. The reason is that Li and Thompson haven't limited their grammar to reflect what's typical in Mandarin, but have tried to include what is POSSIBLE. They don't just include "standard Putonghua" but have included controversial uses and regional variations. In fact, Li and Thompson freely admit in their preface that some native speakers will disagree with some of the sentences in this book while other native speakers will disagree with other sentences. Mandarin has never been totally uniform and certain usages remain controversial and non-universal. I have often found textbooks disagreeing with each other. I also have found native speakers disagreeing with each other too.

As others have written, the tone of this book is scholarly, and not easily digestible, and there are no Chinese characters, only pinyin (but what's the problem with that? There is never any chance of mistaking one word for another since each Chinese word is translated into English). If you can live with these shortcomings, I recommend this book for more serious, academically-orientated students as a supplement to your other grammar books.

Non-native speakers might be dumbfounded by the apparent complexity of the book and think it is too scholarly. In fact, howver, they are only fooled into thinkning so because they are dealing with a subject they are not familiar with--Mandarin Chinese, in this case.