Business Chinese Series, Reading and Communicating 1 - Review

[li3wei1]

This review is part of the Sinolingua give-away promotion.

 

Business Chinese Series: Reading and Communicating I

商贸汉语系列教材，商贸汉语阅读与表达1

姚京晶 编著

2013 Sinolingua

ISBN: 978-7-5138-0364-9

 

paperback, 215 pages, 29cm x 21cm

 

This is the first of a series of 6 books, intended for students who have studied a year of Chinese and are interested in using it for business. The following information is from the preface:

 

 

In addition, the texts are supposed to get more and more formal and 书面语 as the level progresses.

 

The structure of each of the twelve lessons is:

• vocabulary list, with pinyin, part of speech, and English definition;

• main text;

• grammatical structures with English explanations;

• explanations in Chinese of expressions or historical facts that will aid understanding but which you probably won't find in a dictionary;

• questions;

• first supplementary text;

• questions;

• second supplementary text;

• questions;

• questions about the topic addressed by all three texts, including a dialogue and small group discussion topics;

• “after-lesson reading”;

• questions.

 

Each of the four readings is about 800 characters, so there's a total of about 40000 characters of text. However, only the main text is glossed, so there are only 169 vocabulary items introduced in the whole volume. I haven't made a careful study, but I'd say there are probably vocabulary items worth glossing in the supplementary and “after-lesson” texts as well.

 

In addition to the twelve lessons, there are two tests, one covering the first six lessons, the other covering the last six. These include basic vocabulary, fill-in-the-blank, and longer reading comprehension and essay questions. These are timed (200 character essay in 20 minutes, after one year of study? Good luck.), but as they are in the textbook, presumably the students will have plenty of time to study them and prepare for them.

 

The subject matter of the texts is, like many non-business textbooks, about Chinese society: how people work, shop, spend their free time, get around, furnish their homes, find mates, keep up to date, and decide when and what to eat. This is very useful if the kind of business you are going into is selling stuff to the Chinese market. The word 白领 appears 10 times in the table of contents. However, I'm sure that many people studying business Chinese will end up in other areas – manufacturing, quality control, technology transfer, patent protection, health and safety, environmental compliance, training, etc. I'm not sure this book distances itself sufficiently from the usual subjects of language textbooks – festivals, eating habits, traditional architecture – to really call itself a 'business Chinese' textbook. Glancing through the vocabulary lists for some of the lessons, you might wonder whether this does, in fact, have anything to do with business. A text describing a day in the life of a clerk in an import/export firm, with all the specialist vocabulary for paperwork and procedures, for instance, would be of help to almost anyone contemplating doing any kind of business in China, though admittedly some other students might find it a bit dry.

 

As for the texts themselves I haven't had much time to evaluate them. According to the preface, they are taken from “authoritative publications”, “edited for pedagogical purposes”, but there are no credits or authors' names. I found one error that might cause a bit of confusion: “工作以后，年轻人工作忙，压力大。”I'm pretty sure the first 工作 should be 毕业， but most students would probably figure that out pretty quickly. I also found a couple of sentences that I thought were grammatically weird, even English-influenced, but native speakers tell me they are fine and even a bit on the colloquial side.

[li3wei1]

Having read a bit more of it, I realise I was too hasty. Some of the texts are credited. Which makes me wonder all the more about the others, that aren't, especially as they are filled with expressions like 记者调查发现 and include what appear to be quotes from interviewed individuals. Are these articles written about 'business' topics especially for this book by the editor, or are they genuine articles that have been 'edited' so much as to be not worthy of being credited to their original source?