Basic Business Chinese - Initial Impressions [Free Books Project]

[ipsi()]

So I received my books today, and have only had a very quick look through them, but I'll see if I can give some quick first impressions having only skimmed through them.

Anyway, this for Basic Business Chinese, published by the Beijing University Press (北京大学出版社). Not sure if this is related to the Beijing Language (and Culture?) University Press (北京语言大学出版社) which published the NPCR series, though the format seems similar in some ways.

The book starts off with an introduction saying who the book is for, what it's about, and a basic description of the lessons.

This book is for beginners with no previous knowledge, or those with a small amount of experience under their belt (survival competence). A quick glance through the book suggests that is indeed the target level.

Most chapters comprise:

1. Learning Objectives
   
2. Communicative Exchanges
   
3. New Words and Expressions
   
4. Enrichment
   
5. Supplementary Business Expressions
   
6. Grammar and Business Cultural Notes
   
7. Communicative Speech Drilling
   
8. Communicative Activities
   

The only one that does not is the first chapter. This one deserves a bit of attention, as it is the only chapter that does not use characters. Rather, it focuses solely on developing your spoken skills, and the ability to understand Pinyin. I'm not sure how useful it is, but I'll work through it for the full review.

As for the sections, Section 2 (Comm. Exchanges) is essentially the lesson dialogues. Each chapter starts with pinyin, then characters, then English. They're all separate which I like (means you don't get distracted reading pinyin when you want to be learning characters).

The English translations are acceptable but not especially natural. I'm not terribly surprised and it's not like this book is intended for learning English so I'm willing to ignore it for now unless I see something totally wrong or misleading.

Section 3 again starts with pinyin on the left, then characters, then English last. The book focuses primarily on getting people speaking and using Chinese as fast as possible in a business setting so this again works towards that goal. This section will also contain a list of words (in a separate list) of proper nouns. They're also indexed separately at the back (more on the index later).

Section 4 is another list of words, and they just seem to be extra expressions that couldn't fit in the main text. e.g. Lesson 2 has things like 早上好、晚上好、晚安、 etc in this category. Introduction says "Common expressions and terms likely to be useful in a business setting". Sure, that seems appropriate so far.

Section 5 is yet another list of words... Seems like they're related words which will appear in later chapters. If you've used the NPCR series, they're exactly like the Supplementary Words there, and are used in the equivalent of the Reading Comprehension and Paraphrasing.

Sections 6, 7, and 8 I will get to when I do a full review.

In terms of pictures, there don't seem to be many, which I'm ok with.

The words are all listed in the back of the book, but all that gives you is the Chapter number. They're listed by pinyin, with pinyin on the left and characters on the right. But no English! If you want the definition, you have to go to the chapter it's listed in!

That seems like such a silly oversight to me - I do sometimes enjoy looking through the index to catch random words. More to the point, if you forgot a word from a previous lesson (not uncommon), then it's an extra step to find out the meaning. That, or use a paper dictionary. Or Pleco .

What I've listened to of the CDs seems clear so far. There are 3 CDs for the 16 lessons. The first disc has lessons 1 - 5, and lesson one definitely packs in the practice, being twenty-four minutes long rather than the 4-10 minutes the other chapters clock in at.

So yeah, those are my initial impressions. It seems good so far. The vocab seems appropriate, the CDs are good, and yeah.

Having said that, I'm up to NPCR 3 (slow going at Uni...) so the fact that I'm not necessarily part of the target audience may colour my views.

[elina]

the Beijing University Press (北京大学出版社). Not sure if this is related to the Beijing Language (and Culture?) University Press (北京语言大学出版社) which published the NPCR series,

Completely two different publishers:

Beijing University Press：北京大学出版社

Beijing Language University Press: 北京语言大学出版社 (previous names: 北京语言文化大学出版社, 北京语言学院出版社)