Customer Reviews

Integrated Chinese, Level 2: Workbook

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

 

 

This is a good introductory textbook for learning Chinese. It follows the standard format of dialogs followed by vocabulary lists and grammar explanations. The dialogs cover a variety of everyday topics, and refreshingly enough, are not centered around tourist activities like other textbooks. I would have liked to see more reading passages in addition to the dialogs; the textbook does not introduce reading passages until the latter half of the book (although I suppose it could be argued that students don't have the vocabulary to read much before then).

I have to disagree with the reviewer who claims that the book uses vocabulary which is never introduced. When I was using this book, I never encountered a word which was not in the chapter's vocabulary list or a previous chapter. Occasionally the chapter vocabulary even lists words that were introduced in previous chapters, but might have been forgotten.

I found the grammar explanations in this book helpful and easy to understand. The critical reviewer failed to mention that the grammar explanations provide example sentences which make the particular grammatical concept quite obvious (at least to me). Many Chinese textbooks use very formal language to describe simple grammatical concepts; Integrated Chinese is no exception, but the example sentences and any English dictionary will help you to understand them.

"de hua is a particle. It is used in a hypothetical clause. It must be followed by another clause"
A hypothetical clause is just that; a clause introducing some kind of hypothetical situation. "If X, then Y" - the first clause would be the hypothetical clause. The book clearly demonstrates this with example sentences(this is taken from page 106):
"If you are going, make sure that you give me a call."
"If Mother insists on my studying medicine, then I'm not going to college."

"sui zhe is used in the first clause to indicate a changed circumstance. The second clause introduces a concomitant change."
"Concomitant" means "accompanying", or something going "with" something. And this is exactly what the examples given in the book demonstrate:

"With economic development, people's living standards are improving."
"With economic development" here is the clause with the changed circumstance, "people's living standards are improving" is the concomitant change.

Integrated Chinese is as good a textbook as any for learning Chinese. I think the New Practical Chinese Reader series is a great choice as well, especially since they come with DVDs. You can find audio CDs for integrated Chinese, but you will have to purchase them from Cheng & Tsui at a premium.

This textbook serves as a solid continuation of its first-year Chinese counterpart, with a useful mix of review and new materials for the vast majority of students who will begin second year Chinese after a long summer hiatus. It does not baby you throuh every single grammar point and vocabulary item, but this is the preferred method since if one is to succeed in advanced Chinese he or she must be able to absorb a mix of familiar and unfamiliar characters and grammar points. This is an important skill which will be mandatory for anyone who pursues Chinese to an advanced level, as even those foreigners who think they are "fluent" in Chinese will consistently encounter characters and grammar points they do not know and must make educated guesses based on their knowledge of grammar and past vocabulary. As always, however, no textbook is a substitute for a poor teacher, and those students unfortunate enough to both be unmotivated and have a bad teacher will likely find this textbook frustrating due to the fact that is a model representation of what further studies in Chinese will inevitably encompass - that is, neverending frustration overcome only by long nights with a dictionary.

Integrated Chinese II includes both traditional characters and simplified, and introduces extremely useful vocabulary and grammar which will be essential for any intelligent speaker of Chinese to know. After over a year in Taiwan and China, and being more or less fluent, I still find my personal Chinese vocabulary largely made up of the vocabulary and grammar points first encountered in this textbook and learned back when I was in my second year Chinese class.

Simply put, for the motivated, serious student of Chinese who aspires to eventually fluency, there is no better textbook available. Those who feel otherwise are misplacing the inherent frustration of learning 3,000 Chinese characters mistakenly onto this textbook rather than on the nature of the Chinese language itself (and possibly their subpar teachers).

If Integrated Chinese, Level 2 were for any other language, I would say it was a lousy textbook. But, unfortunately, there don't seem to be that many good Mandarin Chinese textbooks available for college use. I may be wrong - I haven't seen all that many - but there must be some reason Integrated Chinese is used at so many colleges, and that reason is probably that not many other, better ones are available.

One problem is that the vocabulary translations are poor - it would be better, when a word is a compound of two characters, to give a separate meaning to each character - this makes it easier to memorize each character.

Also, there is no English translation to the text, and it's not always obvious what the sentences mean, even when you have translated every individual word. (The examples in the grammar section are, however, translated into English.)

And the other reviewer is right about the poorly explained grammar - there is so much IC2 doesn't even begin to explain, and what it does explains it does an incomplete job of, not answering the obvious questions any student would have. To be fair, however, comparing Chinese to English grammar is very difficult, and a thorough exploration of all the differences in each short text or narrative would take a couple dozen extra pages. (A good book for beginning grammar is "Chinese Made Easy.")

Now, to the advantages of IC2: Everything in the textbook is given in both traditional and simplified characters, except for the index at the back of the book. (See caveat about workbook below.)

The workbook has a good amount of exercises and also an additional text, a little story or anecdote (that you also have to look up the vocabulary for, however). As another reviewer noted, though, the workbook is mostly in traditional characters: only the additional texts are given in both traditional and simplified; all the exercises are in traditional only. (Once again, editorial inconsistency.)

A final, and most important, advantage is that there are lots of resources for the IC series on the Internet. Lots of teachers who use this textbook have set up websites for their students (and everyone else who surfs) with voice recordings of the text, simplified transliterations, pinyin transliterations, flashcards that you can print out, flashcard and other games that you can play on line, grammar lessons, etc. All you need to do is search "Integrated Chinese," "Integrated Chinese English translation text," etc., for what you need to supplement an otherwise frustrating text.
And, of course, buy a few additional references like "Chinese Made Easy," "Oxford Starter Chinese Dictionary," McNaughton's "Reading & Writing Chinese," etc. The "Oxford Starter Dictionary" I especially recommend.

Although this book and its accompanying workbook are not as strong as the first year level, I still appreciate this textbook. One of the best aspects of this book is the combination of speaking Chinese and written Chinese, which I have discovered at Tsinghua to be so very, very different. I might be able to understand everything that was said in class, but at an accompanying page in the textbook, it may take some time to uncover the same thing. IC2 is solid preparation for what should be third year level when you should be focusing on reading.
I do not necessarily think this book should be a year long course (as I am on the quarter system at University of Washington, I think two quarters would be adequate). With the foundation that the level 1 books provide, I think the number of vocab words is appropriate to the level, in fact may be too few. The words have been useful here; the later sections allow for conversations (albeit somewhat shallow) into political topics and societal issues. And believe me, these are things that many Chinese want to talk about with foreigners, particularly ones from the States. Explanations although at times unclear, are generally solid. One critic pointed to flaws for things that should not even be in IC2 since they appear in level 1.
People have pointed to the problems of the workbook texts and the traditional/simplified issue. These books are designed push your Chinese and require instructor supplementing, but using a dictionary to look up the new words should not take long (dictionary skills are VERY important when you start reading real texts). I am firm believer that a person's foundation (at least a couple hundred characters) should be in traditional and later switch over to simplified even if they have no intention of going to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Traditional characters are still widely used on the mainland in signs, menus, and in hand-writing. There are also many cultural relics (like stelas) that used traditional characters. If the culture has appeal, then traditional characters are an absolute necessity. Moreover, things like karaoke (KTV) make traditional characters a must. There is a very ordered system for turning traditional to simplified and it takes only days to figure out completely, but it is impossible to go the other way around.
Although the book has some shortcomings and in some cases the explanations are a little tough, the benefits outweigh the defects. It introduces cultural idioms and issues with which all Chinese can identify with. As for the typos and mistakes, the second edition is coming to press soon and these errors will be redressed. But with a proper instructor, these errors are not a significant detriment to IC2.

The content is excellent. I like how they present chinese idioms. This workbook contains many disturbing technical errors. The simplified and traditional versions of the passages do not always contain the same characters (certain characters are deleted for no apparent reason). Some of the simplified characters were not simplified properly. There is not enough room to complete answers. The text is too small. It is hard for people learning chinese to learn a particular character when it so small.

This book drives me mad. In its defence, the first two books in this series are by far the best introduction to chinese series you will find around. I used them throughout my first two years of university and I still go back to them as reference. Still a great buy.

Level 2 however, is incrediably frustrating. If you are learning from traditional characters, this may not be a problem but I started the series in simplified and this book, while claims to be bilingual, clearly expects its readers to know traditional. The workbook is written completely in traditional and many of the instructions in the textbook are also difficult to read. The grammer lessons are poorly structured and lacks clarity in its objectives. There is definately a need for further editing in this book which is a shame as the first two were so well done. There are several instances where there are uses of words that are not introduced until later in the book. For those of you learning 'from scratch' and have been following this series, the third level is extremely hard to follow and inconsistent. I am currently using this book in a course and find it very unreliable as a learning and reference source. If however, you already have a fair degree of chinese language skills (traditional/dialect or otherwise), are already comfortable with the grammer, or simply wish to stregthen your mandarin, many of these problems may not be applicable to you.

Otherwise, I strongly suggest shopping around to see what other textbooks are available.

I've been studying Chinese for around 3 years now using Cheng and Tsui books, and overall I would have to say that all of their books suffer from some of the same problems.

1)They give out random and useless vocabulary words, while many useful words and phrases are left out. I'm in China now, and I've been very dismayed to find that they never covered many basic day-to-day interactions in their books at all. For instance, they don't teach you how to ask for a check at the end of a meal, but they do teach you how to say 'conductor's baton'.

2)The books don't do a very good job of reminding you about words you've learned in the past. It's as if you're expected to perfectly memorize every single vocabulary word they give you. I'll often come across a word that I think I've read maybe in an earlier lesson, but that hasn't been used at all since, and I'll have to take a few minutes to look through the dictionary in the back to see what it is. The problem is, this dictionary doesn't cover vocab from earlier books, and doesn't cover grammar at all. I thus have to find other ways to look up the words. This can be very hard if you don't know the word's pronunciation, due to the nature of Chinese. In short, by not reminding you of words once you're done with a lesson, they make an exercise such as going through the workbook a drudgery that takes much longer than it should. They could have fixed this by simply adding a 'words you should remember' page every so often.

3)Being in China (Nanjing, to be exact) and studying with actual Chinese speakers has led me to the realization that some of the English explanations of the vocabulary words are either wrong, or don't give you an accurate picture of the meaning of the word.

4)They sometimes skimp on explanations when they introduce a new grammar structure, and they often don't give any explanation at all. I understand that learning by context is often better, but context often isn't enough.

5)The books teach you how to speak about a lot of very specific things, but it seems to me that they don't quite teach you the basics well enough for you to actually speak in Chinese.

I would personally say that these things make it worth checking out other books before you try Cheng and Tsui. I'm in China now and my teacher is looking for other books to supplement my vocab and fill in the gaps left by these books. My fellow students who have also been using these books from the start are all having similar problems. In fact much of this review is supported by their own feedback.

This book is not a credible source for learning. There are many technical errors (simplified characters are not properly simplified) and the translations are often inaccurate. I have been forced to use a dictionary to retranslate some of the vocabulary. The grammar section is not helpful; the language and terms used are difficult to follow. The text is so small that I am unable to discern new characters and learn them.

The content covered is fairly good. It is helpful that both forms of writing are included.

This is an intense study of the chinese language, everything is included, reading, writing, etc. I purchased the book for a chinese 201 class at my college, and I am pleased at the progress I have made.

I recently finished a semester of university Chinese using this book. After finishing the course, I wrote a letter to the publishers of this book trying to explain the errors in their effort. I did not even have time or the energy to cover the mistranslations, merely the most obvious ones such as not using simplified Chinese in the simplified sections and only having the barest framework of simplified Chinese.
I also felt the grammar sections, aside from being only in traditional Chinese, counter to its subtitle claim as being 'Traditional and Simplified Character Edition', were at best poorly, and often times totally without explanation. I believe that the material selected was not chosen with much thought. I lived in China for several years where I learned how to speak the language quite well. I made it a point to speak more Chinese than English every day, yet only two or three times in those years would I have wished to have reviewed any of the chapters in this book. I cannot even recommend this book for use as a coaster for the table.