I love this book because of its sheer usefulness for everyday life and conversation, especially the first 8 of the 12 chapters. Even the later ones on more arts based topics made me feel interested in Chinese art, history and so on, (although I defy any textbook to make me interested in Chinese literature! ).
Far East Everyday Chinese Book 1 Pdf 13
I don't think I've ever seen a finer textbook for any language than T'ung & Pollard's Colloquial Chinese. Apparently it's been used in the first year or so of classes at SOAS, but it's equally suitable as a detailed and thorough "teach yourself" course. Its introductory section explaining what Mandarin is (and the alternate terms for it), as well as about Chinese "words"/morphology, characters, Pinyin, pronunciation, tones, word order, and the layout of the lessons, is all a marvel of concise yet informative writing, and this succinctness carries over into the grammar explanations generally (which deal not only with structures but also with concepts, functions, and the keywords around which they may all revolve). In the words of the authors, 'All the basic syntax of modern spoken Chinese is contained in these pages', so there will be little real need to buy supplementary grammars (and such books probably won't explain, and certainly won't contextualize, the points so well).The core of each lesson is its Dialogues, but even when matters might be (and would be, in lesser, sterile courses) mainly transactional, such as shopping for (n) items, and paying X amount, things are livened up by humour, emotions, even various forms of "impoliteness" conversation-wise (incredulous answerers, somewhat argumentative spouses, etc etc etc). When one goes back to other courses, most if not all seem very pedestrian, plodding, not at all lively in comparison. A case in point is the old PCR course mentioned in above posts - the trite characterization invites ridicule, due no doubt to students feeling bored and frustrated with the unimaginativeness of the set-up and writing in it. Another plus of the CC course is that there isn't a static cast of characters every.single.lesson, and it's more what the different people say (and how they say it - the original audio is excellent, with animated speakers, and certainly not too slow) that provides the interest. Names ("personalities" in lesser courses) don't get in the way of genuine personalities many and plural. The overall effect is like having a window opened into Chinese social life, where it certainly isn't all exchanging endless polite boring pleasantries and platitudes with lionized foreigners like Gubo and Palanka, but rather how the Chinese more interact among themselves, slight warts and all.Methodology-wise there is lots more besides the generally excellent explanations and the lively and imaginative Dialogues: Presentations help set the scene, Sketches help recycle the key items, Speech Patterns highlight and contrast structures while providing umpteen additional examples and plenty of really-nail-it drilling, and finally the Exercises are reasonably challenging and without answers (so one has no option but to understand - actually grapple with, learn and master - the material they help review). The Exercises involve manipulating various aspects of sentences*; answering regarding yourself and in Chinese in reply to questions posed in Chinese; answering questions on the basis of information given in the lesson contexts; and translating from English into Chinese, and sometimes vice-versa. One particular feature I really like and think very useful is that in each of the first nine lessons (the book contains seventeen in total, of increasing length) there are a couple of Expansion Drills (see attachment below, though there are limited previews available on Google Books: =jMofKEBKQ4AC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false ). These are basically "backchaining" drills, the idea being that it helps (in ELT, at any rate) the student build up speed/fluency and get the stress and intonation right if he or she starts at the end sometimes; stuff like this can also aid "parsing" too - chunking the language into logical and more sayable units. Each Expansion Drill line is a complete and well-formed utterance in itself, though the addition of extra items each subsequent line can obviously change the context a fair bit.As stated in the first paragraph, this is a course in spoken Chinese and is "thus" Pinyin-only in the main textbook (and if characters had been incorporated into the one volume, imagine how much space would've been taken away from more immediately valuable stuff), though an excellent supplementary Character Text is available that teaches all the necessary stroke orders (and its traditional version includes at least the simplified orders, and vice versa) and presents all the material from the book in character form (though the characters actually used in the texts themselves will be traditional or simplified depending on which version one buys), see scans here: -forums.com/index.php?/topic/45121-my-fluentu-review/?p=339300 . To really learn how to read extended texts (that operate and cohere beyond the sentence level), and how to compose written Chinese (in the sense of composition that may necessarily have to differ e.g. in terms of formality from how you would simply speak - writing differs from speech, sometimes subtly, oft times not-so-subtly, in all languages) rather than just learn how to write the characters, one will therefore need other books, but IMHO it takes less genius to cobble together and annotate reading texts (which've usually been written by others) and from them extract exemplars etc than it does to design a course that is redolent of and conveys enough of the essence of speech (and its here-and-now contexts, discourse patterns etc), so the market for literal text textbooks would seem much more open than the market for spoken-language courses. Either way, it is valuable to be able to "read" and "write" out the dialogues of the CC course (this stuff will certainly come in when writing informal letters, emails, text messages and the like), so the Character Text is a worthwhile investment too.The publisher (Routledge) has periodically reprinted this original version of CC despite having released a new (and IMHO vastly inferior, certainly far less ambitious (though that may just the thing for the more casual learner e.g. short-visit tourists)) split-level version by a different author (Kan Qian), so there must still be some demand for quality LOL. Some reviewers note that in some respects the original course is a little dated, but the great majority of the material is still very much relevant and remains in current usage (and incidentally, vocabulary-wise the course must cover well over a thousand items, and the Character Text at least 850 characters (I'd need to check the exact figures)). Looking just now on Amazon, I saw that the main course, Character Text and audio can all be bought for as little as $35 (it's always the audio that will be the most expensive item, but it's an absolutely essential component that really helps enliven the course even more! Indeed, one won't be able to memorize the dialogue, intonation etc even half as well without it). Edit: Routledge has made the audio freely available! -forums.com/index.php?/topic/50783-colloquial-chinese-audio-is-legally-available-for-free/In summary, if there were any item from my Chinese collection that I would rescue before all others in the event of a house fire, or just a single Chinese textbook I could take with me to a desert island, this would definitely be it!*For example (and some are slight paraphrases): 'Make these sentences negative'; 'Replace whichever word is appropriate with the word in brackets and make any other attendant changes then called for'; 'Into which of the gaps below should the marker** de go?'; 'Think of choice-type questions which might draw forth these answers'; 'Combine these sentences'; 'Add X-type clauses** to the following'; 'Explain the function of the particle** le in these sentences'; 'Rewrite these sentences to emphasize X rather than Y'; 'Put complements** in the blank spaces'; 'Rewrite using the ba construction'; and so on.**It should go without saying that the book explains whatever grammar terminology as and when it is alluded to, and in terms of English, before comparing how things work in Chinese. Inattentive, impatient or plain intransigent "students" may however be put off by "all the grammar", but then, it must be said that this is hardly a course for complete slackers! 2ff7e9595c
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