Interactions/Connections Series Indiana University Press

[HendrikLohuis]

Dear all,

First post on this forum I want to make a headstart in Chinese and I consider using several textbooks. I have questions about one of them:

1. 
   Interactions/Connections

(see: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1037_3130_3208&products_id=21389)

This book is part of a series, starting from beginning Chinese all the way to advanced, they get good reviews at Amazon.com and I'd like to use them. However, since they are not available in the Netherlands I cannot browse them in a shop. Does anyone know/use these books and does anyone know whether they include answers to the exercises in the workbooks so I could check my progress?

I hope anyone can help out and give me advice,

Kind regards

Hendrik Lohuis

[wrbt]

I used them in Chinese 101 & 102 a couple years ago... I give them an enthusiastic thumbs down, as did most other students in the class.

Reasons?

1. Uses the “drink from the firehose” technique. Chapters will throw 50-60 new vocabulary items at you, many of which are completely useless to a 1st year student. Why would the authors of this book make is so the 1st year student must recognize the word for “pumpkin pie” to get thru a dialog? I don’t know either.

2. The workbook is weak. Standard waste of time exercises like being given a jumble of words that you must arrange in a sentence…. not completely useless but a very poor way to spend study time mastering material.

3. Supplemental materials suck. They have a DVD with each chapter acted out but it’s doesn’t even employ all native speakers in it. Who wants to practice their Chinese by having to sit in front of a DVD player watching some American student speak Chinese in a video in outdoor settings or driving a car etc. Unless their offerings have changed they didn’t offer any audio on CD or MP3 where you can hear native speakers go thru the dialogs into a microphone, something essential in learning nuances of tones and cadence of the language.

4. Uses coded grammar. I guess some may be ok with this but I don’t like grammar patterns being explained by little sentence charts with various capitalized abbreviations and brackets/parens everywhere, just please use plain English and tell me why they're saying that.

[yonglin]

I heard Integrated Chinese is the best of the beginners' textbooks by US publishers. I used the 301句 as my first textbook (in China): it's cheap and contains loads of useful stuff, but it's extremely boring if you intend to self-study, and the grammar explanations are usually not sufficient (intended for classroom instruction).

I used volume #3 of the New Practical Chinese Reader 新实用汉语课本 for self-study, and I liked the recordings in particular: not only do they read the texts and words, but they also hammer in important grammar structures by repeating loads of phrases (I think this method is very efficient -- I listened to them on my mp3 player when doing other things, and they just semi-subconciously entered into my active vocabulary). The audio CDs are excellent and WAY preferable to the DVDs, which are not sufficient on their own (they don't read the word lists, and the dialogoues are cluttered with background noise). There could be some point in using the DVDs in addition to the audio CDs though, since most of your interaction is likely to be visual as well as aural (more natural).

The NPCR is a Chinese-style textbook intended for teaching Chinese overseas: no school in China uses it, probably because it's relatively expensive (printed on higher-quality paper). Another thing is that at least for #3, all texts are centered around Chinese culture or contemporary Chinese society (of course through the eyes of some 留学生 (foreign students in China)), and they actually teach you interesting things about China in each chapter. (This is probably more interesting than reading about some American guy studying Chinese in the US....) The only downside with the NPCR as I see it, is that they could be a little more intensive, but maybe I think so only because I used a book which might have been slightly below my actual level (or because I'm used to the Chinese domestic printing size and could not believe that any book where the characters are printed in a size actually legible for a beginner is intensive enough).

You can buy the NPCR from non-Chinese bookstores (such as Amazon), but they are about triple the Chinese price. I just found out that you can order it from the BLCUP (the publisher) at Chinese prices using a normal credit card. Of course, you'd have to pay international shipping, but it would definitely be worth it if you're buying a few items (i.e., you'd need a few books and CDs...). Check http://www.blcup.com/en/index.asp

[Edit:If you'd have to pay overseas shipping from the US anyway, it's even more worth considering...]

Good Luck!

[wrbt]

I agree with above poster on quality and value of New Practical Chinese Reader audio component. Outstanding recording quality, lots of material, good stuff.

That's what gets me about Interactions... I can't imagine someone publishing a textbook these days without some form of digitial audio available, especially given how crucial tones are the first year. The DVD with people acting out the dialogue with a boom mike overhead and birds chirping in the background just doesn't cut it.

Look at the direction other programs are going with various media resources like Chinese Odyssey. Perhaps you OP should look for a review of that as well they're supposed to be publishing three years worth of Uni level stuff just like NPCR.

[xianu]

As a Chinese teacer, I find this is an interesting discussion. I have used Integrated Chinese for years, and have always been somewhat dissatisfied with it. I have ocnsidered switching to the Indiana Interactions, Encounters, etc. series, and am testing the Encounters I and II for my third year class next year. On reviewing the Enounters books (these are still in test stage, and not yet published, and they do come with MP3 audio), I liked the format of the lesson: a topic is introduced, and several texts are presented with it, in dialogue and narrative form, including an easier introduction. The vocab is boken up by each reading, and because it is the same topic, we have the opportunity to dig deeper into each topic and explore reactions, do some good in-class discussion, etc. I think it is a good base text for in-class discussion and for giving students the tools (i.e. vocab) to go further and do a little web research on the topics, themselves. If anyone else has used any level of this series, I would like to hear more reactions, particularly if you can compare it with your experience using Chinese Odyssey, or the new Prentice Hall series, or Integrated Chinese.

As for Integratd CHinese, my impression of the text is that they spent a lot of time with the earlier chapters of Level 1, and kind of pooped out, particularly in Level 2. Level 2 does that "firehose" style, and gives increasingly more and more vocab per lesson. By Ch. 15, there are well over 100 words for the text. The good thing is that 15-20 has interesting social topics. the bad thing is that both the students' level and the amount of vocab they have at that point is usually not enough to say anything worthwhile about the topics. I also think they spend entirely way too much time, and too many chapters in a row talking about travel, but that might be a reflection of how I had to break up the textbook/semester this year.

I have used and looked at other texts, and I still keep going back to it, but I still feel bu satisfied. Anyway, my general reasons for dissatisfaction with the Integrated Chinese series are:

1. Though it has improved a little in the second editions, I find the grammar explanations to be hard for students to understand, which, as the teacher, I guess this is where I come in. I find I end up making study guides in addition to classroom explanation and the numerous activities and class exercises that further explain exactly what the book says, but in normal people speak.

2. the examples given sometimes contradict their grammar explanations (and I am not talking about the incorrect examples that are purposely provided to show you what not to do). Or sometimes they tell you one thing, and then give a list of examples that are correct, yet don't support their explanation, and the reasons for why those sentences are correct are just ignored (or left to the teacher to explain).

3. Many of the vocab definitions are vague, or are English homophones, for unrelated words. Again, with a teacher to point these out, not a problem (if you listen) but for self study, it can be a little dangerous.

4. THe workbook reading exercises just love to throw in vocabulary from 1-2 chapters LATER. For the most part, if the students understand (or listen when I tell them this is the case) that this is supposed to help them with letting go of that need to know all the words, this is okay. Some students just assume they wouldn't know it, and have learned reading strategies (i.e. educated guessing) pretty well. Sometimes, however, these words are not extraneous to the text but are crucial to understanding the reading, and to answering the questions.

5. about 50% of the sentence pattern drills are useless. Maybe even more. The only thing many of these exercise drills show is the mechanical fact that the two parts go together to make a sentence, though there isn't any meaning or context behind them. And some vocab or grammar items, particularly in the level 2 books, are completely ignored in the TB exercises, though they show up in the WB, or vice-versa.

[wrbt]

Wow that's a heck of a post. A heck a good interesting post at that.

Item #1 sounds similar to what they throw around in Interactions... it's quite frustrating for students when they must attempt to decipher little coded bracket filled chart like things to figure out grammar. There is a nice midpoint between that technique and the NPCR almost nothing technique... kinda like in Shifting Tides where they just tell it like it is in plain English and throw in a few examples with English translations.

[HendrikLohuis]

Hello all!

Thanks for your thoughtful and kind replies. Seems I started an interesting post. Yesterday I also started a post about Colloquial Chinese written by Pollard and T'ung but no reactions to that one so far. I mailed to the author of Interactions/Connections and it seems there is a teacher's manual available with the answers but she's not very clear how to get it. After reading your comments it looks to me it'd be easier to start with New Practical Chinese Reader, which I'd order from BLCUP as a gentle start (perhaps with another book such as CQ by Pollard/T'ung. I always use two separate books at the same time, it worked really well with Russian.

More comments on New Practical Chinese Reader, Integrated Chinese (which they use at my university) and Colloquial Chinese are welcome! Hope to hear from you all...

Kind regards,

Hendrik

[Pravit]

I used Integrated Chinese level 2 for a good while in the earlier stages of my learning. It's a decent book, but after seeing yonglin's NPCR I really wished I had used that instead. The Chinese are the best at teaching their own language.

I don't know about Integrated Chinese level 1, but in level 2, they're in the US, and all the dialogues are about US student life, which is pretty boring. The basic format is dialogue-vocabulary-grammar explanations. I for one thought the grammar explanations were pretty clear and understandable, and I liked that they actually use all the words in the vocabulary list in the dialogue(as opposed to some books which just throw tons of vocab at you with no examples). There is no audio, but you can listen to the dialogues on a site I'll mention later.

My big complaint with the Integrated Chinese, though, is that they don't tell you anything about China or Chinese culture. I kind of like it when textbooks give a little reading material about culture or geography, but there's nothing about that in Integrated Chinese.

If you want to see what Integrated Chinese is like, visit this site: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/chinese/ (click "class materials" on the left)

They've got all the dialogues and audio online for levels 1-2. I actually skipped level 1 because I was just going off the dialogues and other material on that site to learn.