Chinese Breeze or Step by Step?

[freedom16]

Has anyone used both Chinese Breeze and Step by Step (实用汉语分级阅读丛书)? Does anyone know the main differences between these two series?

I was on the verge of buying Chinese Breeze, but I'm liking the fact that Step by Step has more difficult levels already published (even though I just started learning Chinese...).

I work at a foreign language bookstore, so I may order a few books for the store and check them out, but I can't seem to find a whole list of the Step by Step readers. Does anyone know where I can find one (preferably in order)?

And lastly, where could I buy the Step by Step books in the US (preferably somewhere that doesn't take months for shipping)? So far, I've just found Chinasprout, which doesn't seem so bad, but they're a lot more expensive than Chinese Breeze.

Is Step by Step worth the extra money (compared to Chinese Breeze)?

Thanks in advance!

[character]

You can look through some pages of the Step-by-step books on Chinasprout: http://chinasprout.com/shop/BLH102

The books are also available here http://www.studychineseculture.com/book.asp?id=4941

It looks like they have two books at 500 characters, have a lot of books at 1,000 characters, and then one or two at 3,000 characters. They seem to have the stories in pinyin as well as characters, so that means about half the book is used up duplicating the content in pinyin.

Chinese Breeze has several books at 300 and 500 characters, and so far one book at 750 characters. These books don't duplicate the stories in pinyin (though there are drawings every few pages which take up part of a page).

I like the Chinese Breeze books, but the Step-by-step books look interesting, if expensive for what you get.

[freedom16]

Thanks for the reply.

I thought about using Studychineseculture.com, but the shipping costs (not to mention the wait) to the US are not worth it.

I was looking for a full list to see how many books Step by Step has per level. If they only have 2 at the 500 character level, perhaps I should stick with Chinese Breeze for the lower levels.

I kind of like the idea of having pinyin on the next page at my level. I wish either of these series had English translations too, but oh well.

If anyone else has any input, I'd love to hear it.

[character]

I kind of like the idea of having pinyin on the next page at my level. I wish either of these series had English translations too, but oh well.

With Pleco's OCR (or to a lesser extent, it's handwriting recognition), I find pinyin just wasted space. If you have questions about a passage you read in a Chinese Breeze book, just ask for help on the forum.

You might look at Tales and Traditions which has pinyin and also summaries in English.

It would be a slog, but ChinaSprout has some famous Chinese novels in bilingual Editions. There are also English fan translations of famous Jin Yong and Gu Long wuxia fiction on the net which could be used to help with the original texts.

[crrose72]

Hello,

I personally have used Chinese Breeze and they are well worth the money in my opinion. I have three of the books; 1 at 300 word level and 1 at 500 word level. When I started I had been doing rosetta stone for 6 months and I could barely read a sentence at the 300 word level. Now, I understand the nuances of the grammar as well as being able to read most of the pages in the book without using a character dictionary. They are nice because there is no pinyin anywhere in the book, and only certain words are vocabulary words deemed special (like ruanjian for software program). Also, there are questions in Chinese to reinforce understanding. They also come with a CD-ROM that has a slower and regularly paced reading of the entire book. I found this nice to get proper intonation. The one thing I did notice is that they are written in the Beijing dialect, so will see 'r appended to some words (na'r, fanguan'r...etc.). Other than that, cheap (even with shipping costs the price of the book from purpleculture.net) and well done. Remember to get an HSK character dictionary while you're at it.

Take care,

Colin

[freedom16]

Thank you both for the replies!

I'm really tempted to get Pleco, but I told myself I wouldn't get it until I finished the first volume of Assimil's Chinese with Ease. I tend to start languages and not get very far into them (it's actually my second time starting Chinese), but I'm really trying to go all the way with Chinese this time.

The shipping cost from Purpleculture.net seems pretty high. Just to get 3 Chinese Breeze books (without shipping, $9.20 total), shipping comes out to $20.05 to get them to the US. That's over 200% of the books' total cost. Although I guess that seems to be the case with most of sites that sell Chinese Breeze. Chinasprout seems to be a little more reasonable in that aspect, but I guess their Chinese Breeze books cost twice as much as other sites (still only $6).

In any case, I ordered the whole series of Chinese Breeze (what's published so far) for the bookstore that I work at. That'll give me a chance to check them out. I may look into getting Tales and Traditions for the store as well.

I've actually come across Tales and Traditions a few times, but I never realized it had an English extract. I also never realized it had an appendix with pinyin. I guess I shouldn't skip the table of contents in previews anymore. I'm really tempted to get Tales and Traditions now. I also really like that it has both simplified and traditional versions in one book.

I looked into the Capturing Chinese series, but their level may be too high for me, but Tales and Traditions might just work!

crrose72, do you know of a good HSK character dictionary? I wonder if i'd be better off investing in Pleco for that...

[character]

It can be frustrating trying to read material above your current level. You might want to look at textbooks with dialogues and short texts to get going.

Tales and Traditions (first volume) is a fine book, but it's not clear how many characters it uses, and since it full of retellings of old stories, some of the vocabulary isn't relevant to modern situations.

WRT shipping, you can price out shipping on some shippers websites and see it can be quite expensive. Cheng & Tsui also carries some of the Chinese Breeze books.

If it wasn't for Pleco, I probably would have stopped studying Chinese as the time I could give to this hobby has been quite limited and Pleco let me maximize my study time. Now I can scan in Chinese text and read it with Pleco's OCR looking up the words I don't recognize -- a real time saver.

[Homogenik]

I bought the Step by Step books by Sinolingua, if that's what you are referring to, and I didn't use them in the end because they are all written in chinese characters with almost no english so it was too difficult at my level (I also don't understand why I would need a book on how to learn to read and write chinese characters... if I can already read them). I may use them later though, who knows, they seemed to be well done although in the same dry chinese style of Chinese Practical Reader, so nothing new under the sun really...

[laurenth]

I've read all of the Chinese Breeze books (none of the Step by step series) except the most recently released one. Some of them I've read twice or more. I believe it was an excellent exercise for several reasons. The books have no pinyin, so you get the real deal (albeit a watered down one...). They have mp3s with the same story read slowly and at a normal pace. They are quite cheap. The stories can be somewhat cheesy, but they are varied and sometimes quite entertaining. My impression is that reading that series helped me tremendously to acquire basic reading fluency, made learning more entertaining and allowed me to start the transition from textbooks to, well, the Rest. What is more, nothing beats the warm feeling of accomplishment you get when you reach the last page of your first book full of Chinese characters, without pinyin or translation or grammatical stuff. I owe that to Chinese Breeze

[Shelley]

I think that what ever you decide to go with, i would strongly recommend getting Pleco. If you go for the basic package it is finacially very worthwhile. If at a later date you find that you need more dictionaries you can always add them.

Another couple of helpful tools for learning chinese are Hanzi grids and Pinyinput. Both are very good. There are links to both of these on this forum I believe.

Good luck

[freedom16]

Homogenik, I am not talking about Step by Step by Sinolingua. A link to the series I'm talking about can be found in post #2 of this thread. They are not textbooks, but actual reading material.

I recently bought "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!," the first book in the Chinese Breeze series, although I have yet to read it as I am still reading Anna Mei Banfa, but it looks very promising. I only wish they had English translations somewhere so that I could know if I'm reading it correctly. I know they have a few comprehension questions, but those can be easily answered by matching characters in the answers to those of the texts.

I am really really tempted to get Pleco, I think I may get it in a month or so after I'm done with the GRE. I know of Hanzi grids, though I've actually been making my own grids via Excel as I can customize them more.

Thank you all for the input!

[character]

I only wish they had English translations somewhere so that I could know if I'm reading it correctly.

Feel free to post any questions in the Chinese Breeze thread. FWIW, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" is one of the weaker books at the 300-character level; it can be very repetitive. I liked "Can I Dance with You?", "I Really Want to Find Her", and "Whom Do You Like More?" more.