Review: Voyages in Chinese 1 - Student's Book

[Michaelyus]

Note: I'm approaching this from the opinions collected from various British inner-city secondary school (read: high school or middle school) students as well as the perspective of someone who might use this to teach interested young people.

 

Book 1 takes the student right from the beginning, starting right from 大卫's first 你好, and appears to be geared towards the British market. There's a comprehensive Pinyin initial/final chart, which handily summarises the idiosyncrasies of Pinyin (although the explanations of some of the sounds are in truth useless for teaching secondary school students in class). The introduction of set characters in the dialogues already marks this out as different from the style of MFL (modern foreign language) textbook current in British (state) schools. But that is the most minor of stylistic quibbles when compared with the rest of the real problems with the textbook.

 

It is an integrative course, which covers pronunciation (with plenty of Pinyin "phonetics" drills), vocabulary, grammar, and characters (both reading and writing). The exercises are actually familiar-looking, with a wide range of beloved matching questions (although they are mysteriously given the rubric "link"; the "linked-to" items include pictures, photos, and English/Chinese translations), and oral "talk about this picture" skills.

 

Character writing drills include the full stroke order (apparently PRC order) of the 楷体 by number, with several eight-fold grid squares for practice. It appears the textbook has been designed to be written on directly, although, judging from the colour saturations, it has not been designed with photocopying in mind.

 

The reading practice exercises use ruby Pinyin, fully combined into words beneath standard character spacing (as opposed to above the characters). There are also quite a few rounds of "match the Pinyin to the characters" and vice versa.

 

The textbook comes with an MP3 CD (note: not a traditional audio CD!). It contains the music typical of these courses. There is very little English on it: the emphasis is on the Mandarin, which is of a reasonable speed: slightly slower than conversational, consistently clear, with traditional renditions of 上声 / 3rd tone. There are a few listening exercises per chapter which require the disc. 

 

The grammar explanations often include vocabulary very unfamiliar in this context to children of school age (e.g. "affirmative-negative question"). They occasionally misconstrue English grammar (e.g. "Unlike English, the negative words are placed before a verb or an adjective in Chinese", the negative of which is untrue of English: only "be", "have" as an auxiliary, "do" as an auxiliary, and the modal verbs take the negative "not" after rather than before them in modern colloquial English). 

 

Some of the stilted translations ("What kind of ball game can you play?") are indicative of the difference in semantic fields between English and Chinese. At best they may provide a good teaching point when translating. But at their worst they restrict the student's ability to think in Chinese and to see the correspondence with English and with the ideas they are to express. Several errors of punctuation "what,s" can be seen. Some of the Chinese might come across as stilted too ("这个红苹果" rather than "这个红色的苹果"), but nothing as egregious as the English - although its effect might actually be worse, what with this being a textbook for Chinese and all!

 

 

Verdict: Well-balanced across the skills. Glossy but not stylish; good for basic practice, but its lack of editing (especially in the poor quality of its English) would put me off from using it in any formal classroom environment. Its emphasis on characters is however borne out through the effective graphical design of the course text, including the use of colour to introduce new characters and its sensitive use of ruby Pinyin. Students using this course will require a good teacher to clarify a few points, especially the grammar. As a self-study guide, it would require quite a bit of extra guidance to be acceptable as a textbook. However, I believe that there are many textbooks of a higher quality now available on the market.