A Practical Chinese Grammar for Foreigners

[bluetortilla]

I started out wanting just to comment on grammar books but rambled as I have a tendency to do. Anyway, I hope some people can share their impressions with Chinese texts as well.

 

A Practical Chinese Grammar for Foreigners, or 外国人实用汉语语法-- I really like this book. As for other grammar books, I just finished Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook, and I've partially done Practicing HSK Grammar (HSK语法精讲精练). At my level Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook was quite good and while I'm sure the HSK book will be extremely helpful in the future, for now it's just too difficult. It claims to be for all levels but I would peg it at high intermediate. It left me with more questions than answers. 

 

As for concise, the rather clumsily named A Practical Chinese Grammar for Foreigners (my students get a big kick out of the bold '外国人...' on the cover, lol) nails it, outlining smoothly and 'concisely' what the grammar's purpose is in speaking and in what situations you'll want to use it. It goes straight for the gizzard as it were. It's also got a companion workbook (don't they all?) that's not too easy, too difficult, or too tedious. Logical people made this book.

 

I also survey the Chinese Grammar Wiki by AllSet Learning a lot. It's often stubby, but offers a good bird's eye view of the structure of Chinese. Easy to find on the net and tons of good references.

 

For comprehensive books, I do like NPCR a lot, though they need to flash up their book a bit as my copy looks almost handwritten. Basically I get the feeling that they're all in the HSK club and the course is sort of primer for that (it's the same voices anyway). I for one found Boya boring and haven't picked it up in ages. But maybe I just haven't given it enough of a chance.

 

i really don't like ChinesePod, especially  for basic grammar. And I could never feel comfortable- as a student mind you, learning from a podcast- listening to foreigners speak fluent (or worse) Chinese, or listening to one person have a conversation in English and other person (always a woman) in Chinese. I think they have more than just tea leaves in their cups. I'd much rather listen to Chinese teachers playing the role of exchange students as is the case  with NPCR. I go up and down with CSL Pod. The writing's not that great (the dialogues are too ad hoc), and there isn't enough analysis or structural explanation. The voices are fine. I guess after a while with CSL Pod I'd rather just like to go out and talk to Chinese people by myself. Maybe they're successful then!

[Lugubert]

I don't like "A Practical ..." AT ALL. For a foreigner, the Chinese explanations are just an annoying waste of paper and ink, and obscures any merits that I have yet to find.

 

My current favourite is Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar by Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington (Routledge). For me, it's been immensely more useful than their Chinese: An Essential Grammar.

 

I haven't (yet...) looked more closely at Li & Thompson: Mandarin Chinese  A Functional Reference Grammar, from which my (Swedish) Chinese teacher quoted several useful pages. Might be worth considering.

[bluetortilla]

@Lugubert

 

You'll find that same Chinese/English explanation duo in Practicing HSK Grammar as well. Doesn't bother me, but I guess the main criteria for a grammar book for anybody is that it elucidates quickly and effectively without too much undo effort on the student's part to grasp the functions (you should be reading the examples longer than the explanations I think). It also references the particulars smoothly into a larger framework, something I didn't get as much with Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and a Workbook.

 

As soon as I finish 外国人 I'll check out the other Ching and Rimmington references you mention as well. What the heck- study them all! : )

[Elizabeth_rb]

Is that 'Practical Grammar' a new publication?  I bought 'A Practical Chinese Grammar' in Taiwan years ago and it was made to dovetail excatly with teh original 'Practical Chinese Reader' books 1 and 2.  As they were the first year text texts for my uni course, I grabbed it.

 

There are some really good books on the market these days as more and more western academics in Chinese language come onto the scene (wish I could be one of them! ).  I recently got the new McGraw Hill Practice Makes Perfect Basic Chinese and there are a number of other books that are pretty decent, or at least look decent as I haven't actually bought/read them yet.

 

Claudia Ross's stuff is great, so the Schaum Grammar, the Routledge 'Modern Mandarin Grammar' and the 'For Dummies' books are all worth having.  The lady who took over my old teaching job at Leeds Uni lang centre uses 'Yufa' as well as the 'Chinese in Steps' series that the Confucius Institutes here go for a lot.  I could go on and on!!

[alanmd]

I like Ross's stuff too, and also Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar (Herzberg & Herzberg) which is good to sit and read but feels less like a reference book. My favourite at the moment though is the one you mentioned: Yufa, A Practical Guide to Mandarin Chinese Grammar (Teng), I've written short reviews of my favourite books in a section on my website so I won't write much here. I think you can't read too many good grammar texts though!

[Elizabeth_rb]

Yeah, one of the academics at my local uni here, Chen Lili endorses the 'Yufa' book.  You can see her quote on the back.  I haven't bought it yet, but I expect I shall soon...

 

I too love the Herzberg book and it's helped me iron out one or two creases.  I want to write a book like that for Chinese, but along the pattern of the Teach Yourself '50 Ways to Improve Your [language]' titles.  They have 50 study points divided into three sections: pronunciation problems, common grammar errors and word choice issues (such as when to use 知道 and 认识， or 能, 会 and 可以 etc, to quote a simple example).  They're aimed at post-beginners and I think something like that would go down well.  The Herzberg book, amongst others, is helping me collate the most common bloopers.

 

Yup, couldn't agree more.  Even though I'm at advanced level, I'm always looking and working through complete grammars and elementary texts, not just for data collation and teaching interests, but also to make double, triply and quadruply sure I don't fall into bad habits.  I've seen it happen just too often.  When one gets to a higher level, one can often forget the simple things and start to totally muff them!

[TheBigZaboon]

I posted this entry into another thread on grammar problems and issues you (we) love to hate, but it seems relevant in this thread, too. So I thought it might be a good idea to append it to this discussion. (If double posting is a no-no, Please let me know.)

My candidate for "Grammar book of the Year" is a publication from about 1993 or 1994. Originally it was a MacIntosh Hyper Book app before there were apps. I don't know if that version is still available, or even if it would run on any of Apple's current OSs. The existing hard copy version is a Resource Book/Workbook pair called "Chinese Unmasked," and it is written by Jing-heng Ma (1994 Cheng & Tsui- ISBN: -Traditional Character Edition 0-88727-190-1, Simplified character Edition 0-88727-198-7)

The Resource Book contains 14 modules as follows:

Numbers (16 pages)

Measures (19 pages)

Locality (14 pages)

Time (12 pages)

The markers Le and Guo (13 pages)

Zhe, Zai, and Ne (22 pages)

Adverbs (11 pages)

Auxiliary Verbs (9 pages) 

Coverbs (5 pages)

Forms and Patterns for Comparison (13 pages)

Ba Constructions (24 pages)

The Bei Construction and Related Jiao, Rang, Gei Constructions (8 pages)

Shi..De Constructions (8 pages)

Resultative Verbs (27 pages)

The workbook matches the modules, and I don't think you can buy them separately, but I really don't know.

 

This book is not a complete grammar book-style overview like the Rimmington or Ross grammar books, it focuses on the specific issues listed above, and gives a pretty detailed explanation with well-thought out illustrative sentences. In some places, it is too detailed for the absolute beginner, but is perfect for the person moving from a beginner to an intermediate level, or for the more advanced student who wants all the background on a particular construction and its pitfalls as a review or reference. I don't have a way of giving adequate examples, but the sections on Ba constructions, Le and Guo, and Resultative Verbs are especially complete and worth the price of the book by themselves.

 

I must confess I am a fan of books published by Cheng & Tsui, and I will recommend a number of them in the coming months. They are the developers and publishers of Integrated Chinese, which I have not used and have never even seen. But a fair number of the members of this forum have probably used this series in college and university courses. I have no connection to the company, other than that both of us come from Boston, and I used to shop in their retail store when they still had one.