Steve Kaufmann - How good is he?

[wrbt]

I've never used New Text but you can buy audio on tape here:

http://www.cheng-tsui.com/product.cfm?sid=51584425L23124130507002M1178227292185L208U178U183U161T44631033T2&p=68&c=0

Slight pain factor hooking up a boom box to a PC and running VLC to convert 'em to MP3 but since you've got the book might be worth it.

[koreth]

Unfortunately, that's the other book of the same name -- the one I have is from Beijing University Press, not Cheng & Tsui.

This is the one I have. (And it's a pretty good book, too; I got it because it's one of the textbooks for Stanford University's second-year summer intensive Chinese course, which I was considering taking.)

[wrbt]

That's interesting. They even mention your book in the description of the other one.

I think I'm in similar stage as you man, trying to absorb enough intermediate level structured materials to make the final push/jump into being able to effectively learn from authentic materials.

Good luck.

[kudra]

The two books "A New Text for a Modern China" are both by the same authors, except the one from Beijing Univ. has an additional author. Based on the link, the BJ Univ. pub. has only simplified, while the CT pub version has both trad and simp, as I can verify from my copy (not used much yet.)

I didn't know that the CT version had audio.

[SteveK]

The launching of the new LingQ system has been delayed for one major reason. We tried to produce an off line "client" version and we gave up after one year spent on the project. We just could not make it easy enough, pleasant enough and light enough on people's computers. Since January we have been developing our browser version. The input components which have to do with Listening, Reading, Learning Vocabulary, and all related issues have essentially been dealt with. This includes managing content, sorting content by difficulty, by words unknown to each learner, by other factors relevant to each learner. In addition functions which govern words saved by each learner such as Flash Cards, prioritizing words to learn, tagging and creating specialized lists, tying multiple phrase examples to saved words etc. have all essentially been dealt with.

We have opened up this "input" area of LingQ to our existing The Linguist members. We will add our new Pronunciation, Writing, Speaking and Event scheduling sections in the next few weeks.

Offering other languages is a smaller issue. At present we are targetting our existing members who are learning English. We want to sort through all problems and refinements with them first.

We are using the system in house for French, German, Russian, Japanese and Swedish. There are no problems. We do not anticipate any great delay in introducing Mandarin.

We expect that much of our content in Mandarin will be created or found for us by our learners, especially those whose mother tongue is Chinese. So my best guess is July 1 for Mandarin with limited content and by the fall I think we will have a lot of content at different levels of difficulty and on a variety of interesting subjects.

[L-F-J]

patiently anticipating.

thanks for all the hard work to help others!

[wenhailin]

hi steve, really looking forward to the launch of the lingQ system, just got a question about what you said earlier.

"4) Use the squared exercise paper that Chinese school children use (or used to use). Write one character 10 times down the first column on the left and then write the translation or pronunciation in pinyin three columns to the right. Then start another character and do the same. Soon you will run into the first character and you will write it again 5 times and put it 3 columns to the right etc."

could you show us (me) what this looks like, because i'm not quite understanding - you only write the pronunciation / translation for the character the first time right? in which case you would then still have nine empty spaces below. do you then write the second character right below the first box in which you've written the pronunctiation for the first character?

also, i've been looking for some good audio + transcript sites, without english, and so far i've found the chinese voices project quite useful - http://www.clavisinica.com/CVP/voices.html

i'm still looking for more, anyone else got some good sites with transcripts?

[Long Pan]

I definitely like this guy. Here is his book. This .doc is a cut / paste of chapters 15 to 29 about his learning of Chinese + Japanese.

Steve Kaufmann.doc

[thph2006]

Hey, Here's something to think about. American women find men with foreign accents sexy. If Chinese women are anything at all like American women why would any foreign guy want to completely erase his accent?

[roddy]

Bizarre idea, but have you considered the possibility that some foreign women may also be learning Chinese?

[strawberry_only]

I think Steve's Chinese speaking is fantastic! I even think his 4 tones are very good too, however I can not find any mistakes. I think if I let my parents listen to his tape then they could not find out he is actually a westerner speaking Chinese.

However if I have to be fussy about his Chinese speaking then I d say he uses more conjunction words than a native Chinese person does, like he uses more 但是，因为，可是。 but this is not a problem though.

[L-F-J]

i really like his chinese and philosophy too, but i would not say he is without mistakes.

for example, he talks about having developed a near-native quality of pronunciation. but i've hardly ever heard him pronounce the chinese X sound correctly. he makes it sound too much like an english S.

i think his language skill like his ability to communicate in another language is awesome! and thats what he was going for rather than trying to sound like a native. as long as he can sound native enough to be understood.