Doing it backwards: using ESL books to learn Chinese

[yersi]

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[anonymoose]

I have, to a certain extent. It can be useful, for example, to see how different tenses are rendered in Chinese, since many books on Chinese for foreigners simply state that Chinese doesn't have tenses, and then don't provide much info on how a particular tense in English would be expressed in Chinese.

However, at least here in Shanghai, I have found plenty of material available for the advanced-intermediate level, covering most of the genres you mentioned. I also recall there were a couple of books published in the UK about writing skills, such are writing the kinds of letters you mentioned.

Anyway, as for books about English as a second language for Chinese speakers, even though most are written by native Chinese speakers, you have to still be careful about the Chinese they use in the books. Sometimes the Chinese is not very natural or is very formal (书面语), but is deliberately such in order to emphasise a particular feature of the English sentence. For example, I just found this sentence off a site about English for Chinese: There will be a meeting tomorrow. 明天将要有一个会议。

Whilst the chinese version is grammatically fine, I doubt many people would actually say it like this. It is more likely someone would say 明天(要)开会。

[yersi]

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Edited August 10, 2013 at 10:02 AM by yersi
I'm dumb

[roddy]

I can see a lot of the vocab / sentence books out there being useful (and there are plenty of vocab lists online, so you can automate the addition of pinyin).

The letter-writing and / or similar I suspect you might be better off with material designed to teach Chinese how to write in Chinese, rather than in English. Here's a couple of examples for writing 请示s. Then there's this for letters of condolence.

You can also get books like this. Could be a stretch at the intermediate end of the scale though, and they all seem to tend towards the business / government sector.

[JohnB]

If you want a book in English on letter writing in Chinese you might look at "Developing Writing Skills in Chinese" by Boping Yuan and Kan Qian ( Routledge, London, 2003). Google books (http://books.google.com) has a preview of most of the first three chapters.