Chinese breeze books

[ianwat]

Hi,

I have just ordered a chinese breeze book level 1, is it simplified chinese & would these flashcards on amazon

(Chinese Flash Cards Kit Volume 1: Characters 1-349: Hsk Elementary Level)

cover the characters in the book, also without sounding daft as a complete beginner thats just starting to learn do you read these books the english way left to right & from the front the book.

Thanks

[grawrt]

Hi Welcome to the forum!

 

The Chinese Breeze books are in simplified chinese. They say in the book that level 1 you need approximately 300 characters to read. It's pretty simple. I wouldn't bother ordering flashcards in this day and age though. You would be better off using pleco or skritter or anki and importing characters that you come across/find important. You can also add the HSK lists for free. Though Skritter is a paid service. Pleco has free flashcards but if you want special extras I'd recommend buying the bundle packs. I don't personally like Anki but lots of people use it and seem to like it so I thought i'd mention it

 

And yes, you read it like a normal book. They number the chapters and pages too.

[ianwat]

Thanks for the welcome & the reply very helpfull

Kind regards

Ian

[Zeppa]

If you're an absolute beginner you won't find the books much use. You need to recognize sentence structures. The language is a bit simplified to match the 300-character limit, but that doesn't make it perfectly easy to understand. They are really useful after a year or two to get practice in actually reading Chinese text rather than just textbook sentences.

The text reads from left to right just like English.

[ianwat]

Thanks for the reply Zeppa, What is the best way to start learning as there is so much conflicting information out there….

Thanks

[Johnny20270]

Hi Ian, 

 

I think its no harm to have the books. I bought Level 1 right at the start and they sat on the book shelf for a long time before I opened them. Its a commendable effort and the stories are along the lines of some soppy kid trying to find a girl from an old picture and as I'm not a 14yo girl I didn't find them interesting. 

 

As for best way to start. That really is a matter of personal choice, and I strongly believe that you should try find something that suits your learning style or whatever works for you. For example: I really liked Pimsleur series as you get going quickly and keeps you motivated. Despite its flaws, I think Rosetta stone is actually useful for the same reasons. Some people like really like ChinesePod and I can see why, its very useful for everyday life, but the lack of structure is hard to work with for me. 

 

Many people feel their way around in the dark for a whole until they work out a pattern that suits them

 

If I was starting out again I would do the following (purely my experience)...

1. start with Pimsleur / RS, as its interesting and you will feel like your making progress. Motivation is a crucial element. 
2. Light background reading on the nature of the Chinese language. Wikipedia entry on Chinese language and related topics are surprising good. Initially I missed the "wood from the trees" I remember thinking, what are these classifiers, measure words particles? What is Pinyin???
3. Collect weblinks, like a dictionary, pinyin table (to see the universe of sound), wikipedia entries to understand the high level structure of the language 
4. Don't overlook tones and force it. Its not easy given we are native English speakers. You may think you sound like an idiot but your brain will constantly try to revert back to monotone.
5. Get a grammar book like "Basic Chinese Grammar". It will be not a whole lot of use at the start but become increasing more useful as time goes by. Pimselur and other courses will start to talk about Chinese version of past tenses/present tense etc and its easy to equate this to the English definition. For a long time I thought 'le 了' just referred to past tense. (which is doesn't necessarily). A grammar book will clear this up for you.  The simple constructs we all know about the English language, such as telling time, using tenses, use of pronouns all appear very odd in Chinese. 
6. Start memorizing  the Hanzi (characters) straight away as you come across them, not just a random list. I would rather watch paint dry but its useful. I wish I did it earlier as the whole idea of homophones is not to be over looked
7. Start making flash cards using ANKI or Pleco. Anki and a spreadsheet works (mostly) for me but I can see why people like PLECO
8. I always maintain hand writing is a 99% waste of time. Others will strongly disagree! You have more than enough on your plate learning Chinese. Given I barely write English anymore I have no interest in hand writing in Chinese. You type pinyin on emails, wechat, whatsapp, QQ etc. I couldn't care less about stroke order and etymology of characters. Others make well like it, so if you find it interesting go ahead, but its a "time invested v practical usefulness" ratio that is far too low for me. 
9. When you learn a word. its useful to have a quick look as to the meaning. I just learnt today that "oven" is "kǎo xiāng",  烤爐 which means roast + box Sticks in my mind straight away as I already learnt these two individual characters before. Similarly with TV (electric + to look st) and elevator (electric + stairs) 

[ouyangjun]

@Johnny - in regards to point #8. At some point I don't think it's important to learn to write all the characters for the exact reasons you stated, but in the beginning I think it helps with the memorization process.  Most times being able to write the character means you will be able to recall it at a higher rate, also it helps you differentiate between small nuances in characters that can easily be overlooked.  For example 提 and 捉, 狠 and 狼, 成 and 咸.  The characters all have a very different meaning, and being able to write them helps reinforce those differences.

 

For me I made an effort to learn to write every character I studied up to the ~1,500 mark.  After that I I didn't see the benefit in making an effort to learn to write them.  Since I have the base of those first ~1,500 characters I know the stroke order, radicals, etc. which means that just by learning a new character I can normally write it now.

 

Also, I do use written Chinese on a regular basis.  I keep a journal in Chinese, I write notes to my Ayi 阿姨 in Chinese, in meetings with my team I will often write in Chinese on the whiteboard, I fill out documents and forms in Chinese at the bank or when signing up for memberships.  Living in China gives me more opportunity to practically write the words.... Not a completely useless task depending on how you will utilize it.

[imron]

I just learnt today that "oven" is "kǎo xiāng",  烤爐

kǎoxiāng is 烤箱.  烤爐 is kǎo​lú.

[Johnny20270]

Posted Today, 06:08 AM

I just learnt today that "oven" is "kǎo xiāng",  烤爐

kǎoxiāng is 烤箱.  烤爐 is kǎo​lú.

 

Ahh yes, indeed! 

 

 

ouyangjun

Yes, I tried writing up to 50 characters and I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on them. Your right though, those ones you learnt really stick in your mind. I always seem to get 着 and 看 mixed up. This is just my view and many have indeed said to me that I should be learning to hand write it but really not convinced. I guess if I were living in china and had a very strong command of the language its a natural progression. 

 

I do wonder how many characters you could 'learn' if you substituted your time with hand writing against visual learning using Pleco / anki. Would learning to hand write 100 characters be equal to recognizing 500 characters visually?

 

 

[edit]

to OP, I meant to add:, if you do get around to reading the Breeze Chinese books, I found it useful to photograph the page on a smart phone and that way you can just look at the unknown word using a Hanzi recognition software. like Hanping Pro or PLECO. I find Haning pro better. I went through the exercise of scanning in 2 whole books but takes up a lot of space on my phone so photographing and deleting seems like a better idea. Another advantage of scanning it is that you can read it on a phone or table PC if you prefer and avoid unwanted attention when standing on a crammed London metro line with a childish Chinese book, lol 

[edelweis]

Usually when I learn characters, I write them a few times. And when I review my vocabulary with Anki, I most often trace the characters on my phone screen.

But I wouldn't say that I learn how to handwrite Chinese characters, because my goal is not being able to be able to handwrite Chinese. My goal is to make character recognition easier. Writing the characters by hand helps with that, because (for instance) the hand movement for 着 and 看 is totally different, so it helps remember the character's components (not as individual strokes, as groups of strokes, 看 starts with a left slope because it contains the 手 component for instance). But I don't make it a goal to be able to handwrite from memory every character I've learnt.

 

Edit : And it helps when looking up characters too, and when trying to read calligraphy and handwritten Chinese.

 

Back on the topic of Chinese breeze book, I too find that just knowing characters and words is far from enough to read the books, because they use almost normal Chinese sentences, and Chinese syntax is very different from English or other Western languages. So even though when you're at intermediate level, the 300 characters Chinese breeze books are actually very easy to read and the sentences are very simple and very very far from newspapers and such,

for beginners who know up to 500 characters the exact meaning and construction of the sentences is still quite hard to understand. (well, I guess that's unless you first reached an intermediate level in spoken Chinese, and only afterwards started learning characters, in which case it would be easier to read those books).

[Johnny20270]

yes, the characters are in Chinese breeze level one are fine for me, i can recognize about 90% but its getting the exact meaning of the sentence rather than the general understanding, that is harder. I still find it very beneficial as you start to see Chinese syntax and general structure over and over and it does start to sink in. I have been through grammar books a lot but its the frequent exposure that i find helpful.

 

One of the problems I find at my level is that it takes me about 10 mins to read a page and because its so slow I lose the flow of the story. However, when I think that I am actually starting to dip my toe into reading Chinese its quite refreshing, albeit at a baby level. 

 

Interesting question. For Chinese breeze level One, would you say that its about a tenth of the way to reading a newspaper? 

 

OP: sorry if I am monopolizing your post but maybe this discussions are interesting for you too

[edelweis]

  well, assuming you'd need at least 3000 characters in order to read newspapers with relative ease, you could say that the 300 character Chinese breeze series is 1/10 of that.

Personally I can't yet read newspapers and I'm supposed to be able to recognize about 2000 characters. But it's not only a matter of characters and vocabulary - newspapers use specific abbreviations and perhaps a specific syntax too, so you'd need to learn to read newspapers specifically. It's a different skill from reading modern novels or non-fiction such as self-help or vulgarization books.

[ianwat]

Thanks for all the replies, i've a lot to go through but looks very helpful especially johnny20270 thanks for taking the time on such a long reply it is appreciated. now just going to go through all the comments properly…..thanks again folks….

[Johnny20270]

As I say I just reiterate this is my experience. i read some comments when I first started and just didn't work for me.

 

Let us know how you get on.  This forum seems to be top heavy with intermediate / advance level Chinese, or maybe they just post more  I think beginners can add tremendous value as when you study any topic for a long time you forget this initial impressions you had of the topic.