Comparing NPCR to China Panorama and Conversational Chinese 301

[trisha2766]

I hope to finish NPCR4 by the end of March. A class I am taking will be using China Panorama Approaching Chinese 3.

I'm thinking about ordering the 3 intermediate China Panorama books primarily because I found some place selling them pretty cheaply. And surely I would get some benefit from them.

Then in another thread someone mentioned Conversational Chinese 301 being useful for speaking skills.

So I'm wondering how do those two series compare to NPCR? If there is somewhat different vocabulary introduced I could see how they could still be helpful at least for learning some new words. And then there's that thing about seeing a word in a different context that just seems to make it stick, even if its in a context that is on the same level or even lower than what you've done already.

And does Conversational Chinese 301 really help that much with sentence structure and patterns?

I suspect I will be getting gift cards from places from Amazon, China Sprout and China Books for Christmas and I'm already planning out what I want to do with them!

Edited December 24, 2009 at 03:36 AM by trisha2766
spelling mistake

[greenleaf1348]

not really. Conversational Chinese 301 is for total beginners; no point in doing it if you've been through npcr1-4.

and it's not that good imo, the grammar explanations are all in "English written by a Chinese teacher" if you see what a mean,... not really helpful and lots of fancy grammatical words

oh, and half of the 301 sentences are about visiting the great wall, living in a dorm, having classes and experiencing the great billion years old Chinese culture.