Customer Reviews

Beginning Chinese: Second Revised Edition (Yale Language Series) (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A few reviewers below have said that the conversations in this text are too old-fashioned and that no one talks this way in China anymore. I haven't shown this book to any Chinese friends but I can't see how the relative colloquialism of these texts would be a big problem. They don't seem very different from others I've read, and the Second Revised Edition (1976) does discuss Revolutionary changes ('airen' versus 'xiansheng' for husband, etc). It seems to be the equivalent of any English text from a few decades ago - people might not talk quite the same way now, but the vast bulk of vocabulary is the same, and anyway, no one ever faults a foreigner for having too bookish or old-fashioned a manner: on the contrary, we often find it charming. Not to mention that Chinese is spoken differently Beijing, Taiwan, Los Angeles, etc. Strikingly, the illustrations, though much superior to the cartoons in other Chinese learning texts, are very old-fashioned: Americans in Western suits and Chinese in silk longcoats. (Though I did see a man dressed like that in an LA supermarket last week!) If the drawings were updated, I bet the texts would not make half so bad an impression.
And the advantages of this work far outweigh the disadvantages. With almost all Chinese language learning texts I've used, I've felt that I had been thrown into a sink-or-swim, suffering-is-good-for-you situation. Brute memorization seems to be the traditional Chinese learning method. In most modern textbooks there is little attempt to explain grammar, and when it is attempted, it is done extremely poorly. Also, there are very few exercises; what exercises there are often stress the wrong things; and the student ends up memorizing lots of vocabulary words and grammar points that he really hasn't seen used in more than one context and so doesn't really understand. The whole presentation seems quite thoughtless and haphazard.
Defrancis, by contrast, seems to have taken the writing of this series as a labor of love. He obviously put a huge amount of thought into them. The presentation is well linked together. Each vocabulary word is thoroughly defined and the grammar notes are extensive. And there is lots of practice: each chapter uses the new vocabulary over and over in the "sentence build-ups," "substitution tables," "pattern drills," and many other added exercises suited to the learning task at hand. For example, in Chapters 3 and 4, when numbers are introduced for the first time, along with the usual "sentence build-ups," etc., Defrancis adds several extra exercises: "Number Practice," "Multiplication table," "Numbers and Measures," "A Charge Account," and even instructions for a number-learning game called "Boom!"
A short, concrete example of how much better Defrancis explains grammar: "Integrated Chinese," which my school uses for first-year text, defines the particle "a" as a "[particle] used at the end of a sentence to emphasize agreement, exclamation, interrogation, etc." It seems like a definition, but when you think about it, it makes no sense: who's agreeing, the speaker or listener? And if "a" is an interrogation particle, how is it different from "ma"?
Now, Defrancis' definition: "The particle 'a' added to a statement changes it to a polite command, suggestion, or presumption. It often suggests that the speaker presumes his listener agrees with him; thus the Chinese sentence 'Ni hao a?' is like English, 'You are well, I suppose?' or 'How are you?' spoken as a greeting rather than as a real question." A clear and thorough explanation of the function of 'a' -- you don't have to spend the next year trying to figure it out for yourself.
The "Beginning Chinese" text is all in pinyin and you should also buy the (traditional) "Character Text for Beginning Chinese" if you are learning to read Chinese characters. Thirdly, there are the "Beginning Chinese Reader, Part 1 and Part 2" books by Defrancis also that are loosely tied into "Beginning Chinese" but present characters in a much more sensible fashion (easier ones and radicals first) than the way they are introduced (or, rather, not introduced) in other series. Another big advantage to this set is that all Chinese characters are written large enough to be easily legible. (Not a given in other texts!) It may seem unreasonable to people who have not tried learning Chinese to have to buy 4 thick texts instead of one. But anyone who has studied Chinese for a while knows how much you need to take a slow, rational approach. This is not French or Spanish or even Hindi. Texts that look easy are actually much more difficult, because they have simply left huge amounts of salient information out.
All-in-all, the "Beginning Chinese" series makes an extremely difficult job (learning Chinese for the English speaker) much, much easier and less frustrating. I am currently going through it to pick up everything I missed in "Integrated Chinese." I really think it's a big mistake that the Defrancis series has largely been put aside for newer, much less well constructed texts. (And may I say that, just because a textbook writer or teacher is a native speaker doesn't mean he knows anything about teaching Chinese to Westerners. On the contrary: often he has little idea of what his students are going through and his answer to protests about poor materials is "Work harder" - not smarter.) The United States is crying out for more Americans to learn Chinese and the texts used in most college courses are as much roadblocks as they are paths to learning. It would be a great service if someone would bring out another edition of these books.

Forget Pimsleur and other chinese courses.
If you really want to learn chinese, then Beginning Chinese was and still is the ultimate chinese textbook.
Beginning Chinese doesn't offer you lively conversations written in natural Chinese but rather stupid conversations in unnatural Chinese.
And in the stupid conversations written in unnatural Chinese lies the true strength of Beginning Chinese.
It is not designed to entertain Chinese but to teach foreigners Chinese.
In natural conversation you leave many things out if it is clear from the context.
In the unnatural conversations of Beginning Chinese you will leave them in, because you first have to learn before you can them leave them out.
That is why the conversations seems unnatural to the Chinese but they are really most helpful to you .

"Character Text for Beginning Chinese" is simply "Beginning Chinese" written all in "Han zi," or Chinese characters, rather than in pinyin. ("Beginning Chinese" being all in pinyin.)

The above 2 books are the beginning (Mandarin) books in Yale's "DeFrancis Series," all written by John DeFrancis. But it's a bit more complicated than that, because in addition to the above 2 texts, there is a third beginning text, in 2 parts: "Beginning Chinese Reader, Part 1" and "Part 2." The "Reader"s aren't transliterations of the texts -- rather, they introduce Chinese characters in a different manner (easiest-to-write characters first, not most commonly spoken words first).

If you're thinking of starting to learn Chinese, or you're already learning Chinese and looking for another text because the one you're using doesn't have enough info and/or practice, I would definitely recommend all these books, if you can get ahold of them, as well as the audiotapes (EXTREMELY useful), which are available through Far East Publications, part of the Yale bookstores, I think. The DeFrancis Series comes as close to being a self-contained, self-explanatory method for learning Chinese as is possible. I am studying Chinese at home now and I find using these texts and tapes is much less frustrating than what I went through during community college Chinese 1 and 2, in which we used the "Integrated Chinese" texts and tapes (as well as live teachers, of course). (I got an "A" for those 2 semesters so I'm not saying this out of thirst for vengeance!) Please see my review of "Beginning Chinese" for more info on why the DeFrancis Series is, in my opinion, so good.

In regards to this particular book, you could just use the pinyin "Beginning Chinese" and then, after acquiring a basic knowledge of the spoken language, go directly to the Readers for a hopefully less frustrating introduction to Chinese characters, and skip buying this book altogether. But most people reading this review, I'll bet, have already studied some Chinese, both spoken/pinyin and written/character, and struggled through learning to write "wo," "nin," etc., cold. (I still flinch at these memories.) In that case, get this book, too, and follow along with it. No, don't consider just getting this book without the pinyin "Beginning Chinese," since one of the most valuable aspects to the DeFrancis series is the English translations of all the text, drills, etc. which are included in the pinyin text but not in the character text. (Otherwise, you won't know for sure if Lin Taitai is saying she lives on a big hill or she is a big hill. And don't tell me you never misread like that.)

This book is the Chinese Character text for DeFrancis' "Beginning Chinese." There are two theories regarding teaching written Chinese to foreigners. One is that you should treat it as a separate subject in the earlier stages of learning the language. For those who agree with this premise, there is DeFrancis' two volume "Beginning Chinese Reader."

The other school believes that students should learn how to write what they learn how to say. For educators who prefer this approach, DeFrancis prepared "Character Text."

If you're a teacher, you can come to your own conclusions without further input from me. If you're trying to teach yourself to read and write Chinese, I recommend that you use the readers rather than this book; learning to write Chinese is a task in itself that has little to do with linguistics. You can read my review of the Readers under their proper site, if you're interested in pursuing the matter.

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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.) Ten 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 scholar-teachers developed this integrated family of language tools.

Danielle Miller-Coe

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

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 (Yale Language)
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)

I'm not an academic, so I have no professional qualifications to evaluate this book. But I enjoy learning languages, and I know what works for me.

This is the best learning textbook for Chinese that I've come across. Granted, it's somewhat dated, but the presentation of the grammar is clear, and the drills are first-rate. (important note: buy the tapes that accompany the book; try the language lab at Cornell, or Far Eastern Publications, in Yale. The language lab at Seton Hall University used to sell them as well).

There are 24 lessons, and the common theme throughout is the experiences of an American student in Taiwan. Each lesson begins with a dialogue, and is followed by new vocabulary and what DeFrancis calls "sentence build-up"; the new vocabulary is introduced first in small phrases, then in full sentences. Each lesson introduces 4 or 5 grammatical patterns, with illustrative sentences. The lessons also have pronunciation practice, addditional drills, dialogues, puzzles, etc. Again, the tapes are excellent, and indispensable.

The book is geared toward spoken Mandarin; all the Chinese is in pinyin romanization. If you're interested in the written language as well, there's his 2-part Beginning Chinese Reader that excellent, as well.

If you're serious about learning Chinese, want to know more than a few phrases, and you're willing to invest the time and energy to learn it well, it would be hard to find anything better than this.

When I studied Chinese back in the 1970's this was the beginning text we used. I was not extremely satisfied with it then, and I am even less satisfied today. Arguably, it covers the subject of Chinese grammar in considerable detail, but my overall impression of the material presented is that it simply isn't the "way that Chinese really speak" - that is, it really doesn't reflect colloquial Chinese as it is actually spoken, even taking into account that it is supposed to be Taiwan Chinese. It is as if there is too much interference from English grammar in the way it is presented.

I am even less satisfied with it nowadays, with the large amount of language study material now available from China. While some of the material printed in China can be a bore, some of it is really extremely good - Beverly Hong's "Situational Chinese" springs to mind as perhaps the best book on colloquial Chinese I have yet found. I'd suggest to the would-be learner to review the material available from Beijing before investing any of the books in the old Yale Asian series.

After reading the other reviews regarding "How the Chinese really speak", I asked my instructor what he thought.

He explained that the communists forced unwelcomed changes to the Chinese language and it is because of communist rule that people don't speak exactly this way anymore. One example he mentioned is that communists demanded that the word for "girlfriend" also be word for "wife". He believes times are changing and the culture is slowly re-embracing the original ways of speaking Chinese. I am not an expert in Chinese affairs so I am not able to comment either way on that issue.

For me, the book is well structured and easy to follow but I've only covered the first 2 chapters. My instructor has been teaching Chinese for 35 years and he's had his copy for at least 15 years. He highly recommends this book. He knows more than I do so I'll stick to what he suggests.

I really want a book like this, but this isn't good enough. I want a book that gives me a ton of conversational Chinese in Pinyin so I can get a lot of language "practice" with the vocabulary, grammar, etc. used again and again in all kinds of scenarios.

This provides all of that but, frustratingly, it's of no use.

My wife and her family are from China. I let my wife see this book once (the Chinese character edition), and she quickly scrunched up her nose and said, "Nobody talks like this!"

Later, when my wife was out, I tried the same test on my wife's aunt (who doesn't speak any English). She seemed reluctant to comment. I think she was afraid of causing me to lose face, so I showed her another Chinese text that contained hanzi (Chinese for Today, Beijing Languages Institute) and asked which one she thought was better. After about 20 seconds of page scanning she got very excited and said (in Chinese), "Oh, yes, this is the normal way people talk" (yiban de shuofa), and "you should study this one".

Unfortunately, Chinese for Today probably contains less than 10% of the total quantity of example text in Beginning Chinese, with not very useful vocabulary and skimpy grammar explanations, so I'm not a big fan of that one, either.

But despite the wonderful quantity of example material in Beginning Chinese and its sequels, it's of no use to me if what I'm getting so much great practice in is bad Chinese. I can come up with plenty of bad Chinese on my own. ;-)

To be honest, I don't know how much of the "bad" is just the Mainlander's reaction to Taiwanese Mandarin, but my wife and aunt (who like to watch Taiwanese dramas) claim "they don't even talk like this in Taiwan". (I never mentioned Taiwan until after they had rendered their verdicts.)

If only the publishers would update this series to make the language sound natural to the ears of educated Mainlanders, it would be one of the most useful Chinese texts on the market. If that happens, I'll recommend it to everyone.

This system will give you a solid foundation if you follow these guidelines:
A) First, learn how to hear the difference in the sounds. Consider [...] as a teaching aid. Then, learn how to say the sounds.
Move on to reading characters, and finally writing characters. This entire process could take years. I am only on the first step after about 12 months.

B) Get a tutor! It will be lots of fun, especially since this book uses some old fashioned words that will make your tutor laugh, and, provoke interesting conversation about Chinese culture.

C) Buy the tapes!! An absolute must, and expensive, but worth the investment if you are serious. Amazon does not sell them though. I found them at an online Christine Chinese book store, Melissa Yao is the purveyor.

D) Practice practice practice.