Building Vocabulary Through Children Books??

[calibre2001]

I've been watching plenty of Chinese shows (gameshows, movies), audio CD learn Chinese books and picked up words and terms along the way. Having seriously learnt chinese for the past 7 months, I realised that my vocabulary is very much lacking. And I wish to improve on this.I dont even know how to say paper clip, telephone cord, cufflinks, wolf, etc...basically simple words that we all learnt as kids and rarely use. Many of these words don't pop up in daily use, hence I thought why not use children books.

I've found children pictionaries and story books with pictures and pinyin below the chinese characteristics. These might be very useful. I just want to know what are your experiences using this type of material? Is it worth it or are there other better alternatives to build up a sizeable vocabulary to include all these rarely used terms? Appreciate your input.

Cheers.

[Jonny Wang]

My experience has been that Chinese language curiculuum (sp?) can be divided into two basic types:

Type 1: college Chinese courses taught in the West that have the goal of enabling students to read a newspaper; Chinese university courses that help foreigners prepare for a test, the HSK.

Type 2: courses whose goal is to help foreigners actually living in China learn the words they need to perform basic daily functions and have normal conversations.

To contrast the results of these two types of courses, consider my wife and me. My wife studied Chinese in college in the U.S. She can discuss abortion, domestic violence, political systems, etc. in Chinese, but didn't even know the word for "cucumber" or "tomato" when she arrived in China. Her college courses prepared her for academia, not life in China.

I studied Chinese at a private language center upon moving to China (New Century Language and Culture Center in Tianjin). The curiculuum they use is Martin Symonds' "Chinese Made Easier" which is specifically targeted at beginning learners who will actually be *living* in China. Through this course, I learned words for lots of "things" and know how to conduct many daily tasks, but I didn't learn anything about how to talk in Chinese about topics like politics, religion, social issues, etc.

If you find books like Chinese Made Easier, I think they'll cover some of the vocabulary and topics you've missed out on. But even books like that are limited in terms of noun vocabulary that you mention. Kids books would also seem like a good way to go (for instance, foreign adults who have young children seem to learn the names of tons of animals - frog, turtle, giraffe, zebra, etc - that I would never learn from a normal textbook).

[mandarinstudent]

Well, you just have to figure out what your goals are. If you want to be fluent, you have to learn it ALL, not just "conversational" Chinese or "business" Chinese. You can sit there and analyze it forever, but at the end of the day if you want to be fluent you have to know everything from children's Chinese all the way to news analyst Chinese. I started progressing faster once I came to this realization. Stop dicking around trying to figure out HOW to study (e.g. "Oh god, am I using the right book? Is this vocabulary going to be useful? What if I am studying it wrong?...etc..) and just study. You have to learn all of it anyway, right? Just study hard and converse with Chinese speakers whenever you can.

[roddy]

If you can find the right children's books, fine. There are also a few vocab books for Chinese learners floating around, though I haven't used any myself and couldn't name them without a trip to the bookstore.

An alternative might be to brainstorm various vocab groups (office items, kitchen utensils, things one might find under the bed, etc) then do a bit of dictionary work to translate them into Chinese and get a friend / tutor to go through them with you to check they're correct.