Business Chinese By Jiaying Howard And Tsengtseng Chang

[jbradfor]

Has anyone out there used Business Chinese, either in a classroom setting or for personal study? Anyone have the vocab already entered for a flashcard program?

I'm thinking about using it for one-on-one language study, and interested in others' thoughts.

My copy just arrived yesterday. On first glance it looks well done, aimed at, I'd guess, someone who's completed two years of university study. I'll post further thoughts as I actually use it.

From the description:

This book will help readers develop their competence in advanced Chinese in a business context. Rather than teaching language in isolation from substantive content, Business Chinese presents readers with both content and context. Exercises and tasks in the book require readers to integrate their language skills with their content knowledge. To meet learners'practical communication needs, the book focuses on both oral and written language skills.

In order to keep readers abreast of the real business world, all texts and exercises are drawn from authentic materials from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Business Chinese is the perfect, practical guide for those who want to master Chinese language and the Chinese business world.

[Scoobyqueen]

I have not got this book but I just had a browse. It looks quite good. However, I am not sure whether it has an explanation of formal constructs (see my previous thread on this) which is really useful for business language as well as an explanation of synonyms eg. (some quick examples not necessarily representative): 建立 and 设立 or 提倡，促进，宣传 which is something I really appreciate about Open for Business(both Volume I and II) which explains both constructs and relevant synonyms.

[jbradfor]

Long overdue, here's my summary of the book.

I've also attached the word lists for the first four chapters. Note that the definitions are taken from MDBG, not from the text book.

Each chapter is dedicated to a certain theme about business. The format of each chapter is

• Dialog, text, and vocab list
  
• Grammar points
  
• "Integrated Practice"
  
• More Practice
  

The dialog, text, and vocab list are fairly standard. They claim the dialog and text are from "authentic native material"; how they get dialogs from "authentic native material" is beyond me, but the texts seem to be. Both are fairly short, about 1 - 1.5 pages.

The Integrated Practice is pretty interesting. They try to reinforce and expand on the concepts and words in the dialog and text via answering questions (in Chinese) about the text, doing some of your own searching, matching, completing sentences, etc.

It includes a CD of the dialog, text, and vocab list, plus the Integrated Practice section typically includes a listening comprehension section. There is also a transcript of the listening comprehension, which is nice.

The dialogs and text are in both simplified and traditional. Everything else is in simplified only.

I'm going slower than I hoped -- shocking, I know! -- and am only on chapter 3 (of 12), so I can't really give a fair assessment of it. That said, thus far I think it's a pretty good textbook. The vocab seems useful, and when I did some further googleing for some phrases, the text I found was similar in tone to the textbook, so it feels pretty authentic.

The goal of the book seems to be providing the vocab and background needed to talk about how business is done, and provide some basic background on the types of business more common in China, e.g. import/export, trade, and manufacturing. Which is different than my business background. For example, I didn't know what "entrepot" was until it appeared on a vocab item.

I would say the level is appropriate after 3 years of college-level language study; I think after 2 years it would be pretty intense on the vocabulary and sentence structure. It feels aimed at classroom use. It is divided into 12 chapters, which is one chapter per week for the length of a semester, and the More Practice is clearly there (at least in my opinion) for classroom to allow the teacher to make the class harder or easier. One could certainly use it for self-study, but I think one would really benefit from having someone that can explain things to one.

Overall the quality of the editing was good; I found only a couple of errors. The very first vocab word, 某, had an type-o in the pinyin (listed as mo3), and the second chapter had 合同 as he2tong2. And 笔 is used as a measure word in chapter 2 dialog (yes! it's a measure word too! Who knew?), but not explained as such until chapter 10.

While the book is from 2005, and hence much of the stuff is actually older, it didn't feel too dated to me. One funny example, however, is that in chapter 3 they discuss a joint promotion between IBM and NWA selling PCs; why is that funny? Well IBM no longer makes PC and NWA no longer exists as they got bought by Delta.

The cons:

To me the biggest con is that the goal of the book is not what I wanted. What I wanted was a textbook about learning how converse (and behave) appropriately in a Chinese-speaking business environment. From Scoobyqueen's questions above, I think she was thinking the same as I was. No, there is not really much discussion of formal constructs, because it doesn't really try to teach you how to talk in a business setting. It also doesn't really cover synonyms, but there is a decent amount of context. I would say that the difference is that this book tries to teach you how to converse about business in Chinese, rather than trying to teach you to do business while conversing in Chinese.

The sound quality on the CD is HORRIBLE. It sounds like someone took a $5 microphone, plugged it into a laptop, and asked a grad student to talk. You can hear a lot of ground hum in the background, in the dialog every time a new person talks there is a 2-3 gap and you can hear the background noise change. On one hand I feel bad for complaining; the CD is a wonderful addition, I listened to them over and over, and in spite of the issues they are just as useful. OTOH, given the cost of the book and the overall polish, this really brings down the whole feel.

I'm a bit uncertain about the value of adding the grammar section. The points are good, and I think decently explained, but I think it would have done better to drop this and focus on other parts that aren't covered in standard textbooks.

bc.zip

[travelgirl]

i m interested of the open business,but i m looking for an ebook version.any ideas?