Customer Reviews

Oh, China! Elementary Reader of Modern Chinese for Advanced Beginners

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Unfortunately I can't agree with the first reviewer. The concept behind this book is sound; it attempts to address the needs of students who, due to family background or special circumstances (such as, in my case, having lived in China), can speak some Chinese but have little knowledge of reading, writing and formal grammar. The concept is good, but the book falls short on execution. Problems:

1)There are numerous errors and omissions in the text and in the example sentence patterns. My Chinese teacher, a native speaker of northern standard Mandarin, has confirmed this.

2)The grammar "notes" are little more than footnotes; no formal presentation of grammar is given. One would think that students whose background includes little grammar preparation would require more grammar than a typical textbook provides, but this book contains virtually no formal grammar presentation at all.

3)The sentence patterns are not only prone to error but also frequently contain vocabulary items that have yet to be presented in the main body of the text. Considering that the target audience is students who can speak some Chinese but cannot read and write, why do the authors assume that students using the book will be able to read the characters for these additional vocabulary items before they have been formally presented in the main body of the text?

4)The exercises also frequently contain vocabulary, grammar and/or characters that have not been introduced in the text. This makes doing the exercises incredibly frustrating.

5)Although the main text is presented in both "traditional" ("fantizi") and simplified ("jiantizi") Chinese characters, the exercises are given only in jiantizi, while the sentence patterns (containing characters not found in the main text) and index are given only in fantizi. This makes the book significantly less useful for those who wish to learn only one character set.

6)The organization of the index is a travesty.

In sum, this book needs a much better editing job and more comprehensive use of both fantizi and jiantizi character sets throughout. Perhaps these problems will be addressed in a second edition. Until then, prospective students who fall into this book's target audience group are better off combining one of the many elementary texts on reading and writing Chinese characters with a more advanced book on Chinese grammar, such as Yip and Rimmington's (jiantizi-only) "Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook".

"Oh, China!" attempts to teach both simplified and traditional Chinese and generally does a good job. However, those who want to learn Chinese using only this book, without the help of a Chinese teacher, may want to pick up another textbook instead of (or in addition to) this one.

In each chapter, the reader is presented with a dialogue or short text in both simplified and traditional Chinese, followed by the associated vocabulary. While this does help the reader learn both forms of written Chinese, there are many things about the layout that are inconvenient for those who only wish to learn either simplified or traditional, but not both.

First of all, while there are two versions of each chapter's dialogue or main text, the footnotes explaining the text only contain traditional Chinese (and English, of course). The same goes for the grammar explanations at the end of some later chapters. Interestingly, the exercises at the end of each chapter is only written in simplified Chinese. So, the reader essentially has to learn both in order to understand the text completely.

Other than that, there are a few places in the vocabulary list where the simplified version of the word is omitted (most likely accidentally) and exercises in which more advanced vocabulary (words that have not yet been covered) are required to complete the problems.

Of course, the book also has many redeeming features. The content is fairly interesting for an educational text. The conversations and short texts seem like passages that learners may actually use in real-world situations. For example, one chapter covers the proper way to write a letter. When used as a textbook for a class, the teacher can usually spot the few errors that come up in the book now and then and warn students about them. Also, even though the vocabulary is organized in an odd way (certain easy words are not covered until later on, and some not-so-common difficult words are in the very first few chapters), the grammatical structures really do seem to build up in terms of difficulty and complexity.

Overall, "Oh, China!" is a solid textbook for a classroom environment but should not be used as a stand-alone resource for self-learning Chinese.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer living in China, I needed a book that would quickly and effectively introduce me to the complex grammatical structures and vocabulary necessary to engage in grown-up conversation. Books widely available here in the motherland were not particularly useful - most "advanced" books here tend to avoid the very issues that are most talked about by young, educated people today.

I found "Oh, China" to be a great tool in my personal language acquisition process (a sentence that I can now translate into Chinese...). Most importantly, the book introduces topics of conversation that I often encounter in a method that is all-but-entirely free of bias. I was able to use this book with my Chinese tutor...

While it's true that the grammar isn't perfect - sometimes my friends and teachers laugh @ me for sounding like a textbook - for the most part the grammar lessons were right on, especially their explanations in good, clear English.

The vocabulary problems stated above are, indeed, quite infuriating.

Despite these problems, the book was immensely helpful to me and, overall, a really good book

My one big complaint with this book is that it combines traditional and simplified characters. The "grammar notes" (which are just footnotes) and index are written in traditional characters, while the homework is written in simplified characters. There should be two completely different editions of this book: one for simplified, and one for traditional.

The title indicates that this is for advanced beginners. I don't consider myself an advanced beginner, but this book was very informative and helpful to me. I really appreciated the wide range of information presented with each lesson, and I learned a lot by just going through the lesson once. Although some of the grammar explanations are a little dry, it is a very helpful reference to have if you are learning Mandarin.