Grammar Book in Traditional Characters

[amytheorangutan]

I’m not sure if anyone would find this info useful, I just bought a grammar book last week via books.com.tw It’s called An A to Z Grammar for Chinese Language Learners (當代中文語法點全集).

 

I had been looking for a grammar book in traditional characters. I bought the book on a whim after seeing a youtuber bought it. I haven’t seen any other review about the book so I was pleasantly surprised to find it very clear and useful with loads of good examples.

 

The grammar points are arranged from A to Z based on pinyin and each point has function explanation, different usages, examples on how to use it in positive sentence, negative sentence, question and exceptions. I have taken photos of the front cover and a few pages inside to give you idea if anyone is looking for something similar. 

 

 

 

[mungouk]

Looks good. Does it give any indication of whether there's a simplified hanzi version also available? 

 

Since it's from Taiwan Normal University I guess not... 

[amytheorangutan]

4 hours ago, mungouk said:

Looks good. Does it give any indication of whether there's a simplified hanzi version also available? 

Unfortunately, I don’t think so ? I purposefully looked for traditional characters because that’s what I’m learning and it add confusion at the stage of my learning to read simplified books, so I looked at books from Taiwan. I find there are much less recommendations and reviews on textbooks in traditional characters than simplified. 

 

[mungouk]

Hey @amytheorangutan, I'm curious about learning traditional Hanzi.  Did you already learn simplified first, or did you begin with traditional?

And if you've done both, did you have a strategy for how to manage that transition?  (I guess there must be loads of threads on here about this, if I can find them.)

I'm curious because I've been learning only traditional at present, but my future plans might involve being in Taiwan.  I'm wondering how I might manage that change. 

 

Cheers!

 

[amytheorangutan]

Hello @mungouk I’m actually only learning traditional at the moment. That is what I actively learn using skritter and when I read and type. I have a mainland teacher who uses simplified in our one on one but because I mainly use our time for conversation and dialogues, it doesn’t matter so much. She also lets me write all my homeworks in traditional characters. Eventually, I think I would like to be able to recognise simplified but for now I just ignore them. I have a feeling that if you confidently know a couple of thousands characters in either simplified or traditional, meaning you can read/type fairly well, it shouldn’t be that hard to recognise the other (I heard from a few people online that it would only take a couple of months to switch).

 

My personal reason to learn Chinese is not very practical so in the beginning I chose traditional for the looks, history and all those sentimental reasons but now I’m actually thinking of going to Taiwan hopefully at some point in the future so it works out well but I think even if I planned to go and live in mainland I would still have chosen to learn traditional and switch later. 

[oceancalligraphy]

Thanks for sharing the layout of the book. I saw it when I browsed the books on MTC's site (https://mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/book/book-show-13.html), but books.com.tw only had some intro pages and the table of contents (http://www.books.com.tw/products/0010784421). The entries look very well organized.

 

How are you using the book right now? As a dictionary (such as looking up entries as you go), or like a textbook going through each entry? I wonder because based on the table of contents, I see the entries usually start with Chinese word (such as 嗎, ma, (Ptc), Asking Questions (1)), but some start with English (such as Measures, (nominal), Units for Counting Nouns in Chinese (1)).

 

8 hours ago, mungouk said:

I'm curious because I've been learning only traditional at present, but my future plans might involve being in Taiwan.  I'm wondering how I might manage that change. 

 

Maybe there's some confusion. Taiwan uses traditional characters.

[amytheorangutan]

Glad it could be useful @oceancalligraphy I just use the book cover to cover at the moment going through each grammar point. Some are easy as I already learned them and some are still too confusing. I skip those and mark the difficult ones to come back later on but if I’m listening to Chinesepod etc and come accross a grammar point that sounds complex I use it as a dictionary and go straight there to see the explanations and examples. 

 

I don’t think there are that many entries that are based on the English function such as Measures or Pronouns Interrogative. I think they reserve those sections for topics where there are multiple words used for one common grammar point. Like the 2 examples attached.

 

 

[mungouk]

14 hours ago, oceancalligraphy said:

23 hours ago, mungouk said:

I'm curious because I've been learning only traditional at present, but my future plans might involve being in Taiwan.  I'm wondering how I might manage that change. 

 

Maybe there's some confusion. Taiwan uses traditional characters.

 

Yes, of course I meant simplified.  I blame the beer... ?

 

[spacegiraffe]

Hi! I'm interested in buying it. Did you have it sent to the UK? and if you did, how much did it cost?

[amytheorangutan]

On 7/26/2020 at 10:44 AM, spacegiraffe said:

Hi! I'm interested in buying it. Did you have it sent to the UK? and if you did, how much did it cost?

Hello, yes I have it sent to the UK and bought it from https://www.books.com.tw their shipping fee is a bit expensive, sometimes almost the same as the cost of the books but since it’s hard to find traditional character books, I just swallowed it. I’ve been getting comics and other books from there as well recently. They ship with DHL and normally arrive in 3 days.