Any comments or opinions on the book series "你好“?

[Kong Junrui]

In my Chinese course at my school, we've been using the "Ni Hao" series of books. So far I'm in year 2 and we've used levels one and two for each year. While the book is alright, there's some things I don't like about it that I think should be changed and other comments I have. I'll list these, but first let me explain how the book is set up.

They break each chapter down into 4 or 5 parts, each dealing with the same topic. The first is the "conversation," where they have three to five pages of different situations in which people converse, in Chinese obviously. Next, they have the grammar section, which goes over new sentence formats, special words (such as 了 or 的), and grammar related things, the vocabulary, in which they show the character, pronounciation, and meaning. Lastly they have a "culture" section in which they go over topics relating to Chinese culture, which doesn't always relate to the topic that the rest of the chapter does.

Now, here's my problems with it:

1. They base the given vocabulary on the conversations. "Why is this bad?" you may ask.

What it seems like they do is they make up a conversation between characters, and then give you the vocabulary on new characters used, which results in students not knowing certain (sometimes important) words relating to the topic at hand. They'd only know words introduced in the conversations, severly downgrading the amount of words you'd want to know based on the topic.

2. Too formal. My Taiwanese friend looked through my book and said that the situations and words they have are too formal, and I agree with it. While I can't think of any books that would, they should show some slang words, or at least say other ways to say things that a person in China might come across. Maybe this is stretching it, but I don't like it.

3. They sometimes present situations as writen in stone. This might just be my teacher though. When we learned about "因为/所以" sentences there's no mention that sometimes either the 因为 or the 所以 are left out in spoken language, while I'm pretty sure that on these forums I've read something about that happening.

4. They present new things randomly and without telling you about it. I'm not talking about just new words and such, which are later explained in the vocabulary. I mean things such as in a worksheet we had, that comes with the book, you were supposed to respond to things you'd encounter as though you were at a Chinese friend's house. One of the things you would have to respond to had the term "没什么菜，你自己来。“ The lack of 有 in 没什么菜 confused me, as they didn't explain that sometimes that's left out.

Those are the things I can think of at the moment. So has anyone heard of this relativaly new book series? Oh and it's based in Australia, or at least it was ment for Australian students, so sometimes the terms they use confuse me, being in the USA, but only rarely, like with the term "biro." Is that supposed to be a pen or something?

Thanks for reading.

[roddy]

You've never heard the term biro? Bizarre.

I've never even seen the book you're using, but some comments by number

1) Fair point. There should at least be supplementary vocab, either in the book or a complementary workbook. Or teachers could solve this by doing extra vocab exercises - "Find 10 other words you might need when buying train tickets.", etc.

2) I think you'll find almost all textbooks tend towards the formal. While this can be annoying, there's also good reason for it - formal language has a wider application of use, and is less likely to change. Your Taiwanese friends might recommend you try something more casual, but would that apply in Beijing? Singapore? A more formal approach will be applicable in a lot more locations and situations - although you may sound a bit stilted at times.

3) I think restrictions of space and time mean that a lot of stuff is going to get left out of textbooks and lessons. Not every possibility can be covered.

4) But they can train you to deal with every possibility by guessing

Roddy

[wai ming]

Just some quick comments, since I'm meant to be studying (sh) :

"Ni Hao" is one of the two most popular Chinese textbook series in Australia, the other one is the "Hànyǔ" series (Chang et al) - also Australian. Coincidentally, these are the only Chinese textbooks I'm really familiar with so I can only really compare the two.

I think you have to keep in mind the fact that the Ni Hao series is based on a communicative approach, and that it's designed for use in (Australian) classrooms. This explains points 1 & 4 - a communicative approach means more "natural-sounding" dialogues and less vocabulary, and an expectation that the teacher will introduce supplementary vocabulary, any other vocabulary/phrases not explained, and flexibility in grammar (point 3) etc. It's not really designed as a stand-alone textbook; rather it's meant to give you guidance on how to use the language - the rest is meant to be up to the teacher.

Also, there's no set vocabulary in the Australian curriculum, which again focuses on communication in certain circumstances, and giving students a foundation on which to build their Chinese, rather than aiming to get them to an X number of characters fluency level.

As for point 2, I agree with Roddy - but I'd also add that the material in the Ni Hao series is probably more colloquial than what's in the Hànyǔ series. I remember using a sentence from Ni Hao 2 in an essay once, and being corrected on the grammar (I guess it was the kind of thing that is acceptable in colloquial speech, but not really formal enough for an essay.)

Compared to the Hànyǔ series, I kind of preferred the Ni Hao series. This might have been to do with the fact that I was somewhat ahead of the rest of my Chinese class in high school (since I wasn't a total beginner) and I found that Ni Hao was somewhat more challenging. The Hànyǔ series tends to concentrate more on vocabulary (so you're more likely to get all the important vocabulary pertaining to a particular topic), but was a bit low on natural-sounding dialogues (think the same sentence with different nouns substituted 5 times) for the main part of the text, especially in the first few books. For example, the Hànyǔ series would never teach you the rather useful phrase "我怎么知道？" in relation to asking where something is

I also liked how the Ni Hao series had a separate section on grammar, so that it was properly covered and not at the expense of dialogue (which would be one of my criticisms of the Hànyǔ series: it keeps the grammar in the "dialogues" and in erratic "Notes" sections).

Other things I liked about the Ni Hao series:

- the handwritten comics in each chapter, which help you to learn to read handwriting (not the extremely messy sort, but not the kaishu (楷书) type either)

- the revision chapters (not present in the Hànyǔ series if I remember correctly)

- the inclusion of traditional character equivalents in the index/appendix

- dedicated culture sections (also absent in the Hànyǔ series) which actually go into some kind of detail (I've never seen the 汨罗江 mentioned in relation to 屈原 and 端午节 in any other textbook - not that I've seen many )

- the acknowledgment that not all Chinese people/Mandarin-speakers live in the north of China, somewhere near Beijing

- less reliance on pinyin compared to the Hànyǔ books (at least in the practice/student workbooks - the Hànyǔ practice books like to use "pinyin crosswords" as a way of reinforcing learning, which I tend to find annoying).

And yes, a biro is a pen

Hope that helps

[Kong Junrui]

Anyone else?