Practical Chinese Reader: v. 1
£5.25
Overall, an excellent foundation course - This is one of the classic books. It used to be used at the Oxford University Chinese language courses (I doubt it still is, though), and is a very solid book for beginners. Certainly, you should be aware that Chinese in this book means Modern Standard Chinese (or Mandarin). Cantonese and other dialects are not touched here.Be warned, though. Learning Chinese characters from scratch involves a very steep initial learning curve. However, this book is quite gentle in its approach.There are some provisos, though, using this book.First, the book uses simplified forms of the characters with the pinyin romanisation all the way through. Pinyin is not a problem, it s probably the closest thing to a standard romanisation there is at the moment, and certainly it s reasonably easy for an English speaker to pick up. On the subject of traditional form characters, personally, I would recommend all beginners learn both the simplified forms and the traditional forms from the word go, I hear that it is a lot more difficult to pick up traditional forms later on in your studies, and you will no doubt come across them later on in your studies, so you may as well be able, at least, to recognise them from the off. This problem is easily fixed by looking up each character as you learn them in a good dictionary.Second, the language used is somewhat Beijing-flavoured. Lots of words are which seems a little antiquated now, and in the South of China, seems positively odd. Mind you, this problem is true of all books published in the 80s (cf John DeFrancis excellent series of books), and won t present any huge problems.Thirdly, some of the texts are rather politically motivated. Not so much in this volume, but certainly in the second and later volumes (the Chinese ex-pat, for example, involved in the Four Modernisations in volume two, and the friendly People s Liberation Army soldier in volume three). Take these in your stride, laugh them off as texts from an era gone by (well, mostly gone by).Fourthly, there are no tape recordings for this book. There are recordings of the texts to be found on the web, though, they will give you a good idea of how Chinese is to be pronounced.Actually, if you re really keen, you could get a Cantonese speaker (see local Chinese takeaway for details...) to read them for you, and learn the Cantonese pronunciations of the characters. The Cantonese you d get from this would be quite stilted, but it would be how a Cantonese person (from Hong Kong) would read the texts. If your interest in Chinese is in Cantonese, that s a possible strategy, but get an audio book for Cantonese as well, because this is not a good way of learning colloquial spoken Cantonese.Overall, though, it s a good start, and will introduce some 150-odd characters, up to around 300/400 with the second volume. The third volume is when the Chinese starts getting serious, and you ll be reading proper level Chinese by the end of volume four.
An Excellent Book to learn Chinese with a Teacher - I have bought many Chinese Learning books and this one is the best so far. This book teaches from the beginning the writing of the Chinese charaters (unlike some other books on the market), pronounciation, accent and conversation. Because there is no tape/Cd to go with this book, you will need a native chinese speaker. But this book is well constructed, organised and I have learnt much quicker than with any other books. Excellent tool for a one-to-one lesson or in small class.