科技汉语 (A book for Chinese learners about science and technology)

November 17, 2006 at 08:02 AM

Just wanted to do a quick write-up on a book that I think might be of good use to people. Over the summer, I was assessing my weaknesses in Chinese, especially in terms of the HSK, and I felt that I was relatively weak on the sections related to science and technology. Not much of my studying has focused on this. And I basically never to talk to Chinese people about science or technology. To fix the problem, I was considering buying some sort of encyclopedia or other type of picture book for children, but I never found anything that looked promising.

So, while browsing around the bookstore, I was very pleased to find a new textbook by 北京大学出版社 called 科技汉语. The book has 18 chapters and covers some of the most common subjects related to science and technology. Each chapter has a few readings, and each reading includes between 10-25 vocabulary items, roughly. The book also highlights the important sentence structures and vocabulary items. It also has a few exercises that seem to focus on language use and meaning comprehension. I’ve only done two chapters, but the authors seem to have done a good job at extracting the maximum vocabulary and sentence structure out of each reading.

The readings aren’t too specialized, and so you should be able to understand them if you have taken high school science. For me, at least, it is kind of a good refresher. As far as the Chinese taught, a lot of the vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structures are directly useful for other areas, and in fact, it seems that a lot of the vocab in this book is extremely helpful in making the jump from being able to buy fruit in Chinese to doing well at the university level.

Anyway, I never would have imagined the day that I’d be happy as hell to find a book about science, but here I am.

科技汉语：中级阅读教程　主编　安然　副主编　单韵鸣

Here is a picture of the book from dangdang.com:

http://www.dangdang.com/product/9177/9177174.shtml