Why so many text books in a series?

[leosmith]

There seem to be a lot of textbooks to learn basic grammer, etc, for Mandarin. By this I mean each series seems to have many books to cover what I assume is basic, or normal grammar. Why is this? Are the books giving lots of exercises, or teaching characters , or what?

Japanese has much more difficult grammar, yet basic grammar always seems to be covered in 1, 2 or 3 books. My Japanese text is a single book, which covers all the basic grammar. It's very compact, but still, it's nice to have only one book to worry about.

Can someone recommend a series that has 3 or less books? The less the better.

Thanks!

[ziyi star]

right now i'm astudying with a book called "Comprehensive chinese grammar" and it's great. it explains grammar in an easy way with pinyin and simplified characters... and it's only 1 book!!... if you need more information just let me know and i can tell you more about the book.

[leosmith]

Hi ziyi star,

Does it have exercises and/or 10 or so example sentences for each grammar point, dialogs and such, or is this mainly a grammar summary?

[Lugubert]

From the Introduction in Routledge's Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington: Chinese. A Comprehensive Grammar:

It is intended for readers who have some knowledge of the language and are at ease with its written form, whether in traditional characters or romanizarion.

But examples are given in simplified and pinyin... Their Chinese: An Essential Grammar is more elementary, and doesn't use characters (but has glossary of those used). None has exercises. Both have a sufficient number of examples for each point.

Hung-nin Samuel Cheung: A Practical Chinese Grammar features a useful vocabulary, and is laid out more like a grammar course than as a grammar look-up dictionary like the two mentioned above. No exercises, though. Hard to use if you want to search for a grammatical feature, but if you do it from cover to cover, you'll be quite proficient. Lots of examples.

If you absolutely want exercises with answers, there's A Practical Chinese Grammar for Foreigners, published by Sinolingua, Beijing. The number of exampls should be sufficient. To me, it feels like a waste of space that all explanations are given in Chinese as well as in English. I suppose this is a feature aimed at native teachers. Moreover, examples are in characters only, no pinyin anywhere, and no glossary of the words used. If you're sufficiently energetic, I suppose it could be a great asset. It doesn't suit me.

All of those titles are 1 book each, from "An Essential Grammar" @ 230 pages to "A Practical Chinese Grammar for Foreigners" @ 742.

[ziyi star]

thanx lugurbert for explaining what's the book about... i think that if you're looking for grammar exercises you can create them yourself or download some program for studying chinese that features those type of exercises