Audio for Chinese Dialogues by Fred Fang Yu Wang, Pao Ch'en Lee, Henry C. Fenn

[lostinmymind]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone know how to get hold of the audio for this textbook?  Would really appreciate any help.  Thanks! 

[TheBigZaboon]

The original Yale and FSI audio material is/was available from Audio-Forum, but they've been bought up by a more consumer oriented firm. You will probably have to look at either the Yale University Press site, or search second hand audio and book sellers for a copy (there are 5 CDs in total). 

 

If you do manage to find a set, you'll be entertained by the 1930s-style academic English accent of the 

narrator. The voice actors are probably the teaching staff members of the Yale Chinese department in the 1940s and 1950s. So you don't get the clear, standard voices of current Chinese teaching materials. It's quite a bit of fun. And it is not recorded at the slowed-down, unnatural speed you expect from current textbooks.

 

Let us know what you find.

 

TBZ

[lostinmymind]

Thanks, TBZ.  Unfortunately, I didn't find anything on the Yale University Press site.  I'll try my luck in public and university libraries.

 

[TheBigZaboon]

Also, try anything listed under Far Eastern Publications, as that seems to have been the original publisher, even though it has been subsumed under Yale University Press.

 

Lemme know what you come up with. I do not live in the USA, so some of the Yale publications are not available to me.

 

Thanks, 

 

TBZ

[889]

I'm going to guess these are hard to find because originally at least students would buy just the textbook then head to the language lab -- remember the language lab? -- to listen to the tapes, which were sold to schools not students.

[TheBigZaboon]

By the way, I don't know if your copy of the text is written with the Yale romanization, or not, but for most people nowadays, that's considered a turn-off. If that's the case, if you search for the book title followed by "pdf," you can search for a pinyin version in the pdf format. If you check it out, you will find that it's a pinyin version prepared for DLI (US government) use. It claims to be exactly the same as the original, changing only pinyin replacing the Yale romanization.

 

My "book" copy is buried somewhere, but I seem to remember that it has Yale romanization. Newer copies, probably starting from the 1980's, will favor pinyin, as that was guaranteed to get up the nose of the "old China hands" in their disputes with the then "insurgent" Berkeley young turks. My Chinese history teacher would go on and on about how handsome one of the "gang of four," a guy named Wang (I think that he was a former mayor of Shanghai) was. As I look back now, we all laughed at the time, but we were, in fact, almost all recently out of the various military services, so maybe she was taking her life in her hands. But she still managed to impress us back then, because her work was all in real Chinese. We really envied her her ability to do that.

 

TBZ

[lostinmymind]

On 1/25/2022 at 12:25 AM, 889 said:

I'm going to guess these are hard to find because originally at least students would buy just the textbook then head to the language lab -- remember the language lab? -- to listen to the tapes, which were sold to schools not students.

 

I believe that may be true.  

 

On 1/26/2022 at 1:55 AM, TheBigZaboon said:

By the way, I don't know if your copy of the text is written with the Yale romanization, or not, but for most people nowadays, that's considered a turn-off. If that's the case, if you search for the book title followed by "pdf," you can search for a pinyin version in the pdf format. If you check it out, you will find that it's a pinyin version prepared for DLI (US government) use. It claims to be exactly the same as the original, changing only pinyin replacing the Yale romanization.

 

Thanks, TBZ.  I was initially able to get my hands on the pinyin version.  For those interested, as TBZ notes above, if you search the book title followed by a ".pdf," you'll be able to access the PDF version.  One of the sites that carries the PDF pinyin version also has tons of other resources for Mandarin and Cantonese as well (both DLI and FSI resources).  I cannot vouch for the legality or safety of that site and I have not personally used that site or the resources. 

 

On 1/26/2022 at 1:55 AM, TheBigZaboon said:

My "book" copy is buried somewhere, but I seem to remember that it has Yale romanization. Newer copies, probably starting from the 1980's, will favor pinyin, as that was guaranteed to get up the nose of the "old China hands" in their disputes with the then "insurgent" Berkeley young turks. My Chinese history teacher would go on and on about how handsome one of the "gang of four," a guy named Wang (I think that he was a former mayor of Shanghai) was. As I look back now, we all laughed at the time, but we were, in fact, almost all recently out of the various military services, so maybe she was taking her life in her hands. But she still managed to impress us back then, because her work was all in real Chinese. We really envied her her ability to do that.

 

That's interesting history, thanks for sharing. 

[Mig]

I found a copy at the local central library and indeed the version is in Pinyin. The online *.PDF version is a graphic version so one cannot edit or copy and paste to other platform. Personally, I think is a great companion to DeFrancis series to get real questions in conversational language and useful sentences to learn the spoken language. Although it is an old textbook, I find it much useful as an additional tool with all other online, apps, podcasts and videos. For those who are familiar with this book, have someone found the answers to the questions in each lesson?

[TheBigZaboon]

@Mig Does the pinyin library copy you found have any identifying publishers name or markings that could be used to find or order a copy of the same version of the book?

 

And also, did you find a complete set of audio for the course?

 

Thanks in advance for any answers you provide.

 

TBZ

[Mig]

I found a copy with the pinyin at the Los Angeles central library (lapl.org) and this is the information you can find:

Call #

• Ch 495.182 W241

Author(s)

• Wang, Fangyu, 1913-1997

Title(s)

• Chinese dialogues / Fred Fang-yü Wang ; edited by Henry C. Fenn & Pao-cheʻn Lee.

Publisher

• New Haven : Far Eastern Publications,, Yale University, ([1981])
• ©1953

Description

• vi, 385 pages ; 23 cm.

[TheBigZaboon]

Thwnk you.

 

Are you sure it's pinyin??? I have the same book, but it uses Yale romanization.

 

Does it have an ISBN?

[CitizenJimserac]

I just came across a copy, Yale romanization, and I really like it.

 

It's too bad nobody can find the audio that goes with this, I'm sure it's out there.

 

Any Yalees around who might contact the Dept. of Asian languages. 

It's almost a guarantee that it'll be on some tape somewhere and then just a matter of converting to

mp3's and make it available one way or another.  And I don't care how "old fashioned" the speakers

are - Chinese is Chinese, just as the English of today, despite lots of new words and phrases and slang

is still like the English of the 1930's.  There are differences but the beginning learner hardly cares.

And it would be honoring the great teachers of the past, like Professor Wang and all the others.

Fads come and go in language learning, but the classics remain good for many years after.

 

One other thing.  I'm starting to like that Yale Romanization.  The PinYin is fine as far as it goes, 

perhaps a bit artificial, but the Yale Romanization, despite looking rather curious at first (ywe) for moon, for example),

ends up, after I used it for a while, to be far more intuitive than the PinYin.   Somehow, and for reasons I don't

really understand, the Yale Romanization seems to stick in my head better.

[Qaamar]

Any Yalees around who might contact the Dept. of Asian languages. 

It's almost a guarantee that it'll be on some tape somewhere and then just a matter of converting to

mp3's and make it available one way or another. 

 

Former Yale student of East Asian languages here, but have not yet succeeded in getting hold of any of the older taped materials. Yale no longer uses any of these older materials, and those responsible for creating them, and the program which went along with them are no longer at Yale. But I will keep trying. However, in my opinion, copies of these and other Yale recordings are as likely to turn up in response to forum posts here as anywhere else.

 

And it would be honoring the great teachers of the past, like Professor Wang and all the others.

Fads come and go in language learning, but the classics remain good for many years after.

 

Agree. Which is one reason I have been attempting to find mp3 files or tapes of the Spoken Standard Chinese (SSC) series recorded by my teachers at Yale. They were really wonderful tapes for a lot of reasons I won't go into at the moment.

[a808]

Has anyone tried to contact University of Chicago's "Digital Media Archive" ?  It appears they have converted the original audio recordings of 'Chinese Dialogues' to Mp3 format here: https://dma.uchicago.edu/search?query=Chinese+Dialogues

 

"The Digital Media Archive at the University of Chicago holds some 2,100 language collections across 270 languages. This digital project makes many of our collections freely available for research use, and tracks many others that can be made available for use by arrangement.

 

Whether you are a linguist, an anthropologist, a scholar looking for a global corpus of language in use, a student or a language learner, a speaker of an endangered language, or a member of the general public, we hope you will find something here to investigate."

 

What's more, they also appear to have a large amount of the 'Far Eastern Languages' Chinese language audio material already digitally archived in WAVE or Mp3 format. They also appear to have an Mp3 copy of 'Twenty Lectures on Chinese Culture' - wow! Some of the more interesting (rare) audio material from 'Far Eastern Publications' - that they have archived are:

 

Chinese dialogues (Yale version) 
https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/1106

Chinese dialogues [C.C. Chao donation] 

https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/1103

 

Read Chinese, Books 1~3

https://dma.uchicago.edu/search?query=read+chinese
 

Read about China 
https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/459

Twenty lectures on Chinese culture [Chicago version, c. 1973] 

https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/4270

Speak Chinese (Chao and Yang, c. 1971) 

https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/1098

Strange stories from a Chinese studio 

https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/1116

A first course in literary Chinese: Text selections only (Nos. 1-33) 
https://dma.uchicago.edu/collections/472



Unfortunately the elusive 'Spoken Standard Chinese' set does not appear to be included the archive.

[TheBigZaboon]

As I live on the other side of the planet from Chicago, I would have to get up in the middle of the night to call the telephone number given. Has anyone else been able to figure out a way to download/obtain these resources?

 

TBZ 

[a808]

By any chance has anyone successfully contacted the "Digital Media Archive" in Chicago?  Or perhaps would be associated with the university?  I've reached out to them a few times by e-mail and telephone, ultimately with no e-mail reply or phone connection.

 

It would really be great to access audio for these books, especially as they are all quite useful.