Customer Reviews

Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook

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I've owned this book for a few years now, and frankly I can't
say enough good about it. I'm not one who likes to study
things like "adjectival predicates", and I can assure you the
book is not like that. While there are technical terms in there,
the moment one starts reading the description, it's crystal
clear what is meant. Everything is defined in a way that
non-grammarians can understand.

I especially like the use of pinyin, English, and Chinese
characters for virtually every example in the book, and there
are many (along with exercises). A number of times I've read the
English part of some example and thought "so that's how to
say that in Chinese".

If I had to nit-pick, the only thing I didn't like about the
book was that the pinyin is in bold font, while the Chinese
characters are not. I'm trying to read/write characters, but
my Western eyes are always pulled to the bold pinyin font.

Although I own several Chinese grammars, mostly published

in China, this volume and its companion (Basic Chinese) are the
ones I always turn to first.

Intermediate Chinese provides clear and concise explainations of Mandarin grammer. Explainations and examples are especially well suited to native English speakers, and far clearer than most other Mandarin grammer books that I have encountered. Example sentences use both Pin Yin and Simplified Characters making reading much easier. This book has been an essential companion to my study of Mandarin.

I must start off by admitting that the author of this book is one of my teachers (at Leeds University) and he is a very lovely and enthusiastic man. But this isn't just a personal endorsement of Dr.Yip: this book is really very useful indeed. Whether you work through the chapters systematically (which I have done when revising for exams) or just dip into random chapters to clear up grammar problems, you'll find this book indispensable. I think the examples are relevant, and the explanations both clear and comprehensible (unlike other Chinese grammars I could mention - any of the Beijing University Press ones are shockingly bad). This book is tops - it's getting me through my Chinese degree almost painlessly!