Teach Yourself Chinese

[Pravit]

Split from here

Roddy, you used the TY Chinese? What's your opinion on it? If their scenarios had less to do with tourist-oriented stuff I'd find it more interesting, but it does seem to do a decent job of explaining grammar.

[roddy]

Roddy, you used the TY Chinese?

Yep, I did. This was in 1998, I'm not sure if it's been changed / updated since then but I don't think so.

I thought it was a decent textbook which gave me a solid basis to start on. I think the nature of the TY series means that they are designed for people going on holiday, or who haven't done a lot of language study previously (certainly the more recent ones anyway - some of the older ones like TY Catalan are simply reprints of terrible old grammar translation textbooks) which means that you might not get the depth you want, but the foundation they give you to build on is sound.

I guess as is so often the case with textbooks, it's not what you use, it's how you supplement it. Or something.

Roddy

[Pravit]

Agreed! I kind of disliked the author's references to "Oriental inscrutability" and her explanation of Chinese characters as "the symbols used to write Chinese which you will have seen written over Chinese takeaways", but it does seem pretty decent, for now. I used that abridged version of Beijing university's course as well, and I actually liked it, although I could not understand the page-long grammar explanations for concepts which seemed quite simple and straightforward. But after finishing it, I was not left with a whole lot of vocabulary. I want to get NPCR; I've heard some good things about it, but I suppose I shouldn't rush to buy tons of books and then not use them.

About the Chinese PDA, sounds interesting. The free Mandarin Tools DimSum program has some sort of character-recognition thing, but either I can't draw too great with a computer mouse or it doesn't work very well, since most of the time it doesn't figure out what character you were trying to draw(and it lists about 15 possible matches for the character).

[pazu]

I have only used Teach Yourself Persian (ar... yes that's indeed a reprint, very very bad quality), and Teach Yourself Vietnamese. The latter one is good, but full of mistakes, and Vietnamese friends told me Vietnamese wouldn't say things like that. After that I'm getting a bit skeptical about this series and when I started to learn Thai, I think I should choose a book written by Thai.

[roddy]

The TY series is very variable - especially for more obscure languages. I found my comments about TY Catalan from way back in the archives - written on the 3rd day of the forum .

I stand by TY Chinese though - solid textbook, particularly suitable for those without previous language learning experience.

Roddy

[Pravit]

What do most universities use to teach Chinese? I taught myself Russian with 60s college textbooks and found that they were pretty thorough. What I don't like about some of these "learn X language" books is that they sometimes leave out very basic stuff and go on to more advanced stuff(like TY Persian, I also have that book :D). I'm doing alright with the TY Chinese, but I can't be bothered to learn all the extraneous vocabulary - I just skipped chapter 6 where they just have pictures of various rooms in a house and give you a big list of the Chinese words for things(I've never been any good at memorizing lists of words). But I've peeked at some of the later chapters and they do seem to have you saying pretty complex stuff by then.

[marcopolo79]

In my university, and in many other universities in America, the standard text book for beginners is Elementary Chinese, published by Cheng & Tsui

www.cheng-tsui.com

Lots of people use the Practical Chinese Reader series, but if you're not a fan of extreneous information, give it a pass. It's full of such relevant topics and facts such as the dimensions of Tian'anmen Sq., the recipe for stir fried rape, and all the mundane and irritating bullsh*t that happens to a pair of generic American morons while in China.

[Pravit]

Ouch! Thanks for alerting me to that, I think I'll give it a pass then. I have a similar "Advanced Thai Reader" which is full of similar pointless topics(well, sometimes interesting, but pointless vocabulary). And I'm really sick of the "two Americans/Britons visit X country" format. I understand it's difficult for textbooks to combine interesting material with relevant information, but sometimes they could sure try a bit harder. I'd much rather have relevant vocabulary than interesting reading segments.

[TCcookie]

I posted about these books back in the day, but I'm not sure many people took my recommendation seriously inasmuch as it was one of my first posts and it kind of looked like an advertisement.

I have made great progress in my self-teaching with the Routledge Grammar Series (mostly by Yip Po-ching and Don Rimmington, I think).

The full series (as far as I know) comprises:

Chinese: An Essential Grammar (a reference book)

Advanced Chinese Grammar (another reference book that just came out)

Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook

Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook

(I'm going to guess that an advanced version is coming soon since that new reference book just came out).

The reference books are nice, but I REALLY recommend the workbooks for self-learning. The books are divided into units of general grammar points, and the units are basically formatted like this: Grammar point --> example, example example --> variations of grammar point ---> examples. Each unit concludes with a number of exercises (with full solutions in the back of the book). Combined with outside reading and listening for vocabulary, these books fit my style of learning almost exactly. They're not like normal textbooks that give general "lessons" with grammar introduced incidentally. These books teach the LANGUAGE. Granted, to USE it and UNDERSTAND it you need your own vocab exercises, and maybe it wouldn't hurt to use a simple, more conventional lessonbook first. But I HIGHLY recommend these books to anyone really motivated to teach himself Chinese.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention: all Chinese text in the book is given in both pinyin and reformed characters.

[etribe]

Hey guys, new to the forum and wanted to ask you a couple of questions in regards to the 'Teach Yourself' Mandarin Chinese book by Elizabeth Scurfield as seen here :

http://www.amazon.com/Yourself-Mandarin-Chinese-Complete-Courses/dp/034080467X/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266780912&sr=8-11

1. whats your overall opinion of the book in regards to providing a sufficient learning of Chinese language?

2. what book(s) would you recommend for someone who has learnt this book and wants to progress to the next stage?

regards

etribe