Customer Reviews

Discussing Everything Chinese: A Comprehensive Textbook In Upper-Intermediate Chinese

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just finished a semester of Chinese using this book, and am on the one hand impressed, and on the other hand exhausted. Li laoshi and Wang laoshi teach on all aspects of modern Chinese culture, and provide students with excellent vocabulary and exercises, but at a pace that requires hours of daily study and application. I recommend it--the stories are hilarious, the grammar well explained, and the practice exercises useful--but you must be serious in your studies. To study this book well, at its intended pace, you must be willing to change your daily habits, and orient a goodly portion of your life around this little red book;)

Amazon sees simp/trad as 2 editions of the book (Comments will appear in the reviews of both versions)and may give you confusing cross links. You may want to check the title and ISBN carefully before you buy. As in Aug. 09, "traditional character" does appear in the title of the traditional version on Amazon. The last 5 digits of the ISBN for the traditional version are 91136; for the simplified character version are 20709. The covers of the two books look simliar but the Chinese characters on them ARE in different versions.

The Chinese fonts of the printing are now all changed to SimSun to avoid issues with Amazon's printing capacity. Incorrect auto mapping for a couple of vocabulary in the traditional version are corrected in July 09.

Learners have free access to listening exercises and video clips of this book ([...]). Starting fall09, free mp3 downloads of text recordings are available.

When I bought the book, I simply read the cover (which is in simplified chinese) but when the book came, it was in Traditional. Seeing as I cannot read traditional Chinese, the book was useless to me. Amazon does not have the simplified version, therefore I don't really know why they have the cover for the simplified version. I requested that the cover be changed, but if anyone is looking to buy this textbook before they DO change the photo, please understand that it is NOT simplified!

I bought this book for my 3rd year Chinese class. The readings are hard! They're long and a little complicated, but I think that's good since it helps with my language better. The only problem was the grammar section that took a little getting used to. It includes a lot of review that is good.