Improving sentence structure

[Flickserve]

On 8/20/2023 at 7:44 AM, TheBigZaboon said:

Essential Chinese Mandarin Grammar, by the great Vivian Ling,  proved harder to get than I anticipated, even in Japan, the home of Tuttle Publishing.

 

Guess what. I found this book in the corner of one of my bookshelves. I can't even remember when I bought it.

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On 11/14/2023 at 5:55 PM, TheBigZaboon said:

"The Code" series has plenty of English support, and about five volumes based on various parts of speech. It's very helpful, and should do you a world of good. It's essentially a drill book at the phrasal level for the indicated part-of-speech. Not much explanation, but for a drill junkie at your level, piece of cake. After Kubler, it will be practice to make perfect. But again, try ONE first before buying any more of the series.

So I ordered one book of this series to take a look. Seems pretty useful, and I went ahead and got the whole series. I kind of wish I had these a couple of years ago actually. There are 10 books total, 6 on different parts of speech and 4 on sentence patterns. They vary in length, averaging around 150 pages each. Each book comes with a CD of mp3s, approx an hour of audio each.  On Taobao each book was around 20rmb(new), 200ish for the whole set. I'm sure these are going to provide lots of good drill practice, even if some is just review. I don't think I'll dig into them until I have finished the Kubler Intermediate Spoken.

 

A couple of downsides:

 

1. The mp3 recordings are more "textbooky" sounding than I'd prefer. I think the Kubler recordings are more "regular" sounding.  However, The Code has male voice drills(a plus), whereas Kubler drills are all female voice. 

2. There are zero instructions for use. I have no idea what order to do the 10 books in. Or, whether to do a unit in each part of speech until complete and then do the sentences.

 

Here are a few random pages just to get a sense of the content: