Books on business chinese

[chinesemadrush]

Hi all,

 

Could you please recommend some textbooks I can use for studying business mandarin?

 

I currently use Startup Business Chinese, however, the book covers mainly conversations between people. I was wondering whether there is a book that can teach you how to read and understand chinese business documents such as contracts or company business profiles? Or at least introduce you to terms that you could potentially encounter.

 

Thanks in advance!

[onebir]

Maybe ask Elina, here:

http://studychineseculture.com/

 

She knows her stock very well.

[ZhangKaiRong]

Personally, I don't recommend learning business Chinese from textbooks. Most "business Chinese" books I encountered are quite bad and full of unnecessary/not useful/not practically used terms that have no connection to real business.

 

I'm working in M&A and strategy advisory at a big4 firm, and as a result of being able to speak and write Chinese, I've written some short reports in Chinese and translated some reports from English to Chinese. After learning a year and a half of business Chinese, my first reports went straight to the trash as most words are used were textbookish and not used in business as my reviewer told me.

What helped me a lot to learn the appropriate words was a glossary of business and accounting terms issued by KPMG, including the English/German/Chinese equivalents of the terms. It was a very useful basis for professional business work, and I can firmly recommend it to anyone interested in business/accounting/tax terminology in Chinese.

 

Sadly, Google cannot find it in the new KPMG website, so I found an earlier version from 2008 here:

http://down.cenet.org.cn/upfile/61/2006119153135129.pdf

The new version is from 2011, I don't know whether the differences are material or not.

[chinesemadrush]

Hi both,

 

Many thanks for your replies.

 

Hi ZhangKaiRong,

 

I certainly do understand how you feel about the lack of good textbooks. I have even reached out to professors from my university only to get responses along the line of "get a private tutor".

 

Just out of curiosity, how do you practice reading business contracts then? Did you have to google translate alot?

 

Thanks for the link above. There are other resources I currently use too, just wanted to share them:

1) Merrill Lynch / Tsinghua University: http://www.icfj.org/resources/english-chinese-glossary-financial-terms-and-acronyms-0

2) Morgan Stanley glossary: http://www.morganstanleychina.com/glossary/

 

Unfortunately none of these walk you through like how textbooks do