Suggestions for recommended elementary/beginner's textbook

[mandel1luke]

Dear friends,

I'm looking through coursebooks on elementary Mandarin Chinese. It'd be good to hear some recommendations from this board, since I may end up teaching Mandarin in the near future. I may also write an elementary Mandarin textbook so it'd be good to hear some advice beforehand.

Which are the textbook(s) or course book you find most helpful when you start learning Mandarin Chinese? Or if you teach, which textbooks is most valuable to your students? Why do you find this or that particular book helpful?

Thanks in advance.

[Scoobyqueen]

Why dont you come up with some suggestions as well? You seem to always want people's opinions but appear unwilling to share your own thoughts or interpretations.

Given that you are only just toying with the idea of becoming a teacher without much experience currently, it seems a bit early days to be considering wrirting a text book - especially considering that you find yourself in a position where you cant tell a good one from a bad one. In which areas do you think your future book would particularly contribute from both a pedagocial and contents point of view?

[mandel1luke]

It's a rude and uncalled-for reaction, scoobyqueen. I have already shared quite a lot with this community, including giving many posts explaining the finer points of grammar, vocab etc.

> "just toying with the idea of becoming a teacher without much experience currently,"

For your information I had taught Mandarin to school children before, so it is not "toying with the idea". I am, owing to some reason or other, in some debt and I do want to earn some money working freelance as a Skype teacher. This is not "toying with an idea", but I hope you are not prejudiced against someone who does not, say, earn $3K or $4K as first-world citizens, and really have to scrimp and scrape over his spendings daily.

It appears you seem to know my CV from one mere early post.

Whether or not I'm qualified to write an elementary textbook to help non-natives learn Mandarin is really not up for you to judge. I'm a native, and I'm planning to write this book, and give it out, for free. I've already spoken to at least one person on this board about this, asking him to join me. I don't think it hurt to try.

I'm just thinking of doing something fruitful and repaying society with this free time of my life, and asking for recommendations so that I can do some research on the better textbooks. I obviously cannot give opinions until I've seen the recommendations. I do find the NPCR good and Integrated Chinese as well, and now I'm looking at Kan Qian's Colloquial Chinese, but if I am going to review this, I think I will bore most of you out.

I assure you I have given many opinions on this board before, the last on a software I bought recently.

> especially considering that you find yourself in a position where you cant tell a good one from a bad one

I don't understand this at all. It's a joke, right? I mean, who or what gives you the right to decide whether I can tell a good textbook from a poor one?

Stay with the subject, not the person, alright?

There is an idiom in Chinese called 抛砖引玉, which is what I am doing now. Knowing full well it is a 砖 I'm tossing out, I don't feel qualified to boast too much about my opinion.

[Madot]

Calm down, calm down.

The topic, not the person, right?



To answer the original question—the best elementary Chinese textbook (perhaps the best elementary foreign language teaching textbook) I’ve seen (in a language teaching career of over 35 years) was INTEGRATED CHINESE by Yao, Liu et al, published by Cheng Tsui Company, Boston. It has a textbook, workbook, CDs and character workbook. If you are interested in the technical reasons why, that will be for another, much longer email.

The thing which was most surprising about it, however, was the fact that, at least judging by the names of the authors (quite an assumption, I must admit), the authors APPEAR to be native speakers. It is extremely unusual for a native speaker to be good at teaching BEGINNERS. They are the very best teachers at more advanced levels, but my experience has taught me that as a general rule, the best teachers and/or text-book writers for elementary level language teaching are non-native speakers with near-native fluency because they have gone through the process themselves. It is extremely difficult for a native speaker to identify the difficulties, confusing points, problems, etc. in their own language because despite what some linguists argue, the process of learning a language in a classroom setting is different from learning it through immersion, the way you learn your first language.

SO, why not consider writing a more advanced textbook, one which would take advantage of your native-speaker status? I’m afraid I don’t know how many (if any) really good advanced textbooks are around. Why don’t you check?

Mado

[roddy]

I have already shared quite a lot with this community, including giving many posts explaining the finer points of grammar, vocab etc.

But take a look at the other topics you've started this week:

How do you say this in grammatical Chinese: "Do you have watercolour paint?"

Ditto. Does learners have different tastes as natives?

I have the Traditional Chinese IME installed and would like to input using Unicode. How do I do that? Thanks.

I would like to buy the best one-volume monolingual Chinese dictionary out there. What are the recommendations?

No attempt to give your own opinions, no sign that you've attempted to do some research and answer the question yourself, no background info on why you are interested, I can see Scoobyqueen's point.

[mandel1luke]

Sorry, I've no idea asking a question is not allowed in this forum. It's not as if this is Yahoo Answers, you gain points for answering questions and lose points for not.

Like I say, I ask those questions because I don't know the answers.

My first few posts are all answers to posters' questions. I don't need to justify myself, to say, whether one week I have more questions popping up my mind and the next, I don't.

I think there's a cultural difference here. Chinese generally think it rude to proffer their own opinions before hearing others. They will say “你觉得怎么样?" before giving their own opinion. It's considered courtesy. Westerners on the other hand may be more aggressive and feel that such an approach means "withholding" something back and giving them.

If I keep answering questions, will people feel that I'm acting the "teacher" all the time and get turned off?

'Nuff said.

> No attempt to give your own opinions, no sign that you've attempted to do some research and answer the question yourself, no background info on why you are interested, I can see Scoobyqueen's point.

It's strange, because I've been going to lengths in answering my own questions, such as which monolingual dictionary is considered best. I've quoted examples there, I don't see why there's "no attempt to give your opinions" and "no attempts to do some research and answer the question yourself" etc. And when asked my opinion, I always give them.

[mandel1luke]

Hi Madot,

Thanks for the post.

I'm a native speaker, however I do agree that most natives have difficulty teaching Chinese as a foreign language to non-native learners. Few teachers themselves attain near-native competency level in their second language. I may offend some people out there, but there's the truth (that said, however, most natives out here are very competent in their second language, English ). You must forgive my English, English is not my native language.

The catch is that it's uncommon someone attains native-level competency in both languages.

The reason why I'm thinking of writing such an elementary book is to help out beginners trying to learn Mandarin at no cost. The book will be free. But that doesn't mean I'm going to skimp through it.

The research I have done is quite a lot. I've gone to Internet Archive to look through some really old primers, four of them, in fact, which now resides on my hard drive. I've look through a number of common English learn-it-yourself books, including Learn Chinese (Hanyu) the Fast and Fun Way, Chinese the Easy Way , Teach Yourself Beginner's Chinese and gone through the FSI courses.

I have gone through a number of CD-Rom courses, like Approaching Chinese, Chinese Panaroma etc.

I currently have Yip Po-Ching's Chinese: An Essential Grammar and will look through Claudia Ross's Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar when the reserved book comes. I will read the Comprehensive Grammar when that comes, too.

I understand the frustration of many Westerners when they first approach the language. Chinese grammar and writing are intrinsically different from English. English isn't such a simple language after all, but I would like simply to know how those learners attain their level of competency in Chinese. Is it the hard way - or do they have an easier method?

As I said before, my textbook - an e-book - will be completely FREE and will be aimed a select group of people. I am not harboring thoughts on it being a big contribution to pedagogy. My aim is simple - a book which teaches Mandarin for beginners, written in English.

At this moment of time, the book is about 40% done, but which direction it takes will depend on the research I do / the textbooks I read in the future.

When it is in the beta stage, I will post it on this forum. However, please note that this is a completely FREE book and if you feel that the book is rubbish, please don't start insulting the author for trying to overreach himself. There's no harm in trying. I repeat that the book is given at no cost and I will feel very shortchanged emotionally if in doing so, I draw nothing but hostile, belligerent remarks.

If you would like to hear my personal opinion, it will take a much longer post than this. In short, I would like people's contributions because the book is meant as a gift to people interested in learning Mandarin Chinese. I have already invited one person here to colloborate, If you are interested, there are parts which can be corrected, please let me know.

I have been trying to see Integrated Chinese for some time, unfortunately my library does not stock copies of it. So I'll need to rely on opinions here to know what makes it tick.

Thanks for your post.

[muyongshi]

Without getting into the other thing going on here, why haven't you just searched or checked out the wikis? This subject is covered so often that there are already numerous posts on it. And this is exactly what the wikis are for....we have listed the most highly recommended courses (and these are our personal recommendations- exactly what you asked for) for all levels.

[gato]

At this moment of time, the book is about 40% done, but which direction it takes will depend on the research I do / the textbooks I read in the future.

Don't worry about all that. Just post the 40% that you've already finished and let's have a look. I'm sure people would be willing be chip in their comments if it's at all worthwhile.

[OneEye]

I like China Panorama a lot, but I don't use it as my main source of learning anymore (haven't tried Intermediate or the 2 Advanced courses yet though). I like Beginning Chinese by John DeFrancis very much, as well as the readers. I didn't really like PCR or NPCR at all. I also think Zhang Pengpeng's Most Common Chinese Radicals and Rapid Literacy in Spoken Chinese are both very good.

[character]

Some things I've liked:

- I found the explanations of grammar points in Chinese The Easy Way good. Also, the example sentences are shown in a table, so it's easy to see how the sentence is composed and what changes between each example sentence.

- The amount of exercises available in Integrated Chinese 2nd ed. It would have been even better if they'd at least included answers to odd or even exercises (some way to check your work is important for self-study, admittedly not a primary target of the IC series).

Some interesting things to try:

- It would be nice to see a "rough but correct" translation for example sentences as well as a more polished translation. I.e. for a sentence starting "昨天晚上..." it would be nice to see "Yesterday evening..." as well as "Last night...". IC jumps right from Chinese to polished English, and I wonder if it would help the learning process to see an intermediate, rough translation in between.

- Use a different font for the Chinese characters in each chapter, so readers get used to the general form of a character and don't fixate on one font's version of that form.

[roddy]

Use a different font for the Chinese characters in each chapter, so readers get used to the general form of a character and don't fixate on one font's version of that form.

That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it would work as I suspect it would make the book feel inconsistent and messy, but what about having a handwritten version of words in vocabulary lists, perhaps with handwritten versions of texts as well - in the same way some simplified textbooks will provide traditional alternatives, and vice versa.

[character]

[...] I suspect it would make the book feel inconsistent and messy, but what about having a handwritten version of words in vocabulary lists, perhaps with handwritten versions of texts as well [....]

Handwritten versions of the characters would be great as well. The "problem" would be that the author likely has only one or two styles of handwriting, none of which may be legible.

An alternative to a different font per chapter would be to have each block of reading material set in a different font, but IMO this could look messier than doing it by chapter, and of course it provides less material in that font.

But at the risk of disagreeing with the forum owner, I do think there's value in showing how Chinese characters vary in different fonts early on in the learning process. As your site Signese shows, there can be significant variation. Another good thing to at least mention would be variant characters, such as 裡/裏 in traditional.

Students of Chinese will hit problems with font differences when looking at paper or electronic dictionaries, signs, different reading material, etc. By introducing the differences in a more controlled manner (i.e. in the text, as part of the learning process) it may provide a gentler introduction and help the student concentrate on what's important in a character's form and not get fixated on how it looks in one font.

Or it could result in a messy PDF which hinders learning. I don't know, I'm not an education researcher. The problem with switching between fonts may not be a problem if one is younger or has the time to learn each character's stroke order and practice writing it.

[lau]

I'd vote for handwritten texts in appendix. Putting the handwritten part in appendix would not make it look messy. Fonts, though different, tend to be more intelligible for a beginner than handwriting. Get 4-5 people with handwriting ranging from kindergarden clear to 医生 unreadable, and increase the difficulty of handwriting. Say, lessons 1-5 clear handwriting, 6-10 not that clear ...