Customer Reviews

Advanced Chinese (Yale Language)

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....This series is still the best around. (See reviews for Beginning Chinese, Int. Chinese, and all the other books in the DeFrancis Series.)

John DeFrancis writes that he designed "Beginning Chinese" for all students, "Intermediate Chinese" for students planning to mainly use the spoken language (the book is all pinyin, though you can buy the character text also), and "Advanced Chinese" for those who want pursue a more scholarly approach.

I would say that anyone who wants to read anything in Chinese should get this book. I used "Beginning" and "Intermediate" (studying by myself at home) to prepare myself for the second-year Chinese courses at my local community college. I thought that would be enough, but the text my college used for 4th semester Chinese, "Taiwan Today," was extremely difficult. Now that I am halfway through this textbook, I realize that a lot of the words and phrases that threw me in "Taiwan Today" are advanced phrases used almost exclusively in writing (wen2yan2 rather than bai2hua4).

And, whereas in "Taiwan Today," they were either given only a short definition or even introduced in the text only without definition, here in "Advanced Chinese," these wen2yan2 words and phrases are defined meticulously, featured in several example sentences, and then used several times more in the following lessons.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that a lot of non-native learners of Chinese who do learn to speak it fluently, usually by going to school in China or Taiwan, end up hitting some sort of glass ceiling when it comes to reading. I'm not sure about this - I haven't met that many Westerners who have even reached the speaking level! - but I'm hoping to avoid future difficulties by hunkering down with this book.

Beyond its usefulness, it also "hen3 you3 yi4si." In this text, our friend Mr. Bai is continuing his studies in Beijing. His school has decided to supplement the curriculum by offering 20 lectures on Chinese culture and language. Each chapter features a dialogue in which Mr. Bai and his teacher talk about academic and personal matters, all the while going through the new vocabulary list, and then a text of the lecture proper. Then there's a grammar review, some review sentences, review questions and, very cleverly, a text of Mr. Bai's supposed audiotaped "Fu4Shu4," or summation of the previous chapter's lecture. (That way, you also are reviewing the previous chapter. Apparently this audiotaped review is or was a suggested method for learning Chinese.)

Using these methods, the book offers an extremely, in fact meticulously thorough grounding. If you really want to learn Chinese written grammar (and not just be playing a guessing game as to how all those short little grammatical words affect the overall meaning of a sentence), try this book. (Don't forget to get the "Character Text to Accompany Advanced Chinese" also. The audiotapes, too, are still available through Seton Hall University.)

In a few years, I'll try to come back and write whether I hit a glass ceiling or not!

.
Professor DeFrancis' pedagogically eloquent Chinese Language textbook series (the Chinese language learning "gold standard") ensures future generations benefit from his unique gift for teaching. The series' building blocks are based on data, not guesswork - while a human, sometimes puckish, touch leavens the reliance on metrics. (See "Pedagogically Crafty" page at Syber Group.) Twenty-two of the series' publications are listed at the end of this review - a full description can be seen at Teton Sands' "Professor John DeFrancis Chinese Language Learning Series" page.

Regrettably, despite highly inflated claims by marketers of fad diets and products such as Berlitz and Rosetta Stone, no shortcuts exist. Headway entails digesting the right stuff. Anyone over the age of ten who wants to do more than mouth a few phrases faces a multi-year project requiring considerable investment of time and effort. Mass market products often lead to bad habits and dead ends. Significantly better ROIs can be obtained from an academically-grounded, integrated "family" such as ABC's community (DeFrancis Series, ABC Dictionaries, translations, corpus, Wenlin, and the forthcoming AI system) which has been honed by world-class educators and is impeccably correct in representing classical and current usage. As a side benefit, students assimilate culture and develop lifelong skills in using associated tools such as dictionaries and Chinese word processing applications - and "club membership" conveys a certain cachet.

More than 20,000 Chinese characters exist. Mastering the "right" 2,400 is sufficient to read many modern writings - as few as 400 get you started. The question is, which 2,400 and which 400? DeFrancis designed tightly integrated courseware (grammars, audio recordings, character texts, flash cards, and reading materials) based on well-conceived metrics before Deming, Rackham, and James pioneered similar statistical concepts in manufacturing, sales, and baseball.

Years before Ross and Lakeoff, DeFrancis recognized explicit language and grammar convey only a fraction of the meaning within human thought and communication. A significant amount of meaning - some claim the vast majority - is embedded, often physically and nonconsciously, in referents and metaphors. DeFrancis also recognized that written language "fluency" depends on more than memorizing a particular number of characters: it requires experiencing their range of context and meaning. To that end, DeFrancis collaborated with specialists to facilitate access to and appreciation of Chinese literature, culture and thought - including what Minsky and Rumelhart would later call frames and schemata in the mid-seventies.' His collaboration with Victor Mair is particularly noteworthy.

Mair uses his expertise as one of the world's foremost translators of early Sinitic languages to explicate China's cultural roots. His monumental Anthology (The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature) is full-body immersion via selections of divinations, philosophy, religion, verse, prose, fiction, and performing art. His equally monumental History of Chinese Literature complements the Anthology and ploughs new ground by interconnecting periods and genres, from divine to profane. Research by Mair and his colleagues has occasionally caused a mainstream currency to deflate. Mair is also general editor of the ABC Chinese Dictionary Series - including DeFrancis' Chinese-English and Chinese-English/English-Chinese Dictionaries - which each year saves students and scholars many millions of hours of drudgery.

Based on extensive experience with Mandarin curricula and courseware using English, French, and Mandarin metalanguages, I am wary of courses based on alternatives to DeFrancis' series. It's simply the best. Teton Sands' "Footsteps" page describes how a dedicated community of scholars developed this integrated family of language tools.

Danielle Miller-Coe

ABC English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary (ABC Chinese Dictionary Series)

Beginning Chinese: Second Revised Edition (Yale Language Series English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)
Beginning Chinese Reader (Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I)
Beginning Chinese: Reader Pt. 2 (Linguistic)
Character Text for Beginning Chinese: Second Edition (Yale Language Series English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

Intermediate Chinese (Yale Language Series, 7 English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)
Intermediate Chinese Reader, Part I (Yale Language Series Pt. 1)
Intermediate Chinese Reader, Part II (Pt. 2 English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)
Character Text for Intermediate Chinese (Yale Language Series)

Advanced Chinese Reader (Yale Language)
Character Text for Advanced Chinese (Yale Language)

*** Supplementary Integrated Literature (Selected)***
The Student Lovers
The Herd Boy and the Weaving Maid
The Poet Li Po
The Bookworm
The Heartless Husband
Sun Yat-sen
The White-Haired Girl
Wu Song Kills a Tiger
The Red Detachment of Women
Episodes from Dream of the Red Chamber
Annotated Quotations from Chairman Mao (Yale Language)

The review entitled "Failure" is totally mistaken. All of the reviewer's assumptions are wrong.
The reviewer thinks that in this series of books, someone has reached the Advanced level, without studying any Chinese characters up to this level. The truth is quite the opposite.
If the reviewer had done his/her homework, then he/she would have discovered that prior to reaching this level, the student would have studied the following books WITH Chinese characters:
1. Character Text for Beginning Chinese.
2. Beginning Chinese Reader, part I.
3. Beginning Chinese Reader, part II.
4. Character Text for Intermediate Chinese.
5. Intermediate Chinese Reader, part I.
6. Intermediate Chinese Reader, part II.
That's a total of six (6) books, with over 3,000 pages full of nothing but Chinese characters.
And that's a lot more than any other series of instructional textbooks on Chinese.
The DeFrancis system of instruction separates the reading from the writing part. For every level, there is a textbook with Pinyin only, and another textbook with only Chinese ideograms. That way, the reading and writing parts can be taught simultaneously, or with a phase difference. That means a teacher can teach more conversation and grammar first, and teach the corresponding "hanzi" a little later. But you do not advance to the next level before you master ALL the "hanzi" of the previous level.
In addition to the textbooks, the Readers contain an abundance of new words made up of the SAME "hanzi". They are just different combinations of them. Thus, the student acquires a much richer vocabulary based on the same number of characters.
This series of books by DeFrancis have been first published in the 1950's. They are still around because of their huge pedagogical value. They are NOT a disgrace. But it is a disgrace to make irresponsible and erroneous comments about them.

This supposed "Advanced Chinese" book is completely pathetic. Pretty much the whole thing is in pinyin, in fact it looks like most of the characters are on the book's cover. It just blows my mind that someone would get to this level and still be reading only pinyin. How is that really learning Chinese? When I was learning Chinese, we were introduced to characters in the first week. Since this is book three in the series, that means others have read through two books of nothing but pinyin. Just imagine how stupid it would be for someone born in China trying to learn English and just never really get around to learning the english alphabet. That would be completely ridiculous. I hate that my money was wasted on this book, and I should have done more research on it before buying. I hate that others fall for the same trap I did. I hate the mindset that even brought this book to be published, or even that which perpetuates only pinyin learning beyond the extremely basic level. It's a disgrace. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!!