Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1: Textbook (Traditional Character Edition) (Level I Traditional Character Texts) [Paperback]

Liangyan Ge (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0887272622 | ISBN-13: 978-0887272622 | Publication Date: June 1999 | Edition: 1

The Integrated Chinese Level 1 Part 1 Textbook is appropriate for beginning students at the high school or college level, or for anyone seeking to communicate effectively in Chinese wherever it is spoken. This acclaimed, best-selling series is successful because it "integrates" all four language skills--listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Integrated Chinese helps you understand how the Chinese language works grammatically, and how to use Chinese in real life—how to understand it on the street, speak it on the telephone, read it in the newspaper, or write it in a report. The materials within Integrated Chinese’s set of textbooks, workbooks, character workbooks, and audio CDs are divided into sections of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Two types of exercises are used: traditional exercises (fill-in-the-blank, sentence completion, translation) to help learners build a solid grammatical foundation, and communication-oriented exercises (speaking drills, discussion topics, etc.) to prepare them to function in a Chinese language environment. Frequently, authentic materials written for native Chinese speakers and realia (newspaper clippings, signs, tickets, etc.) are used. Notes on language use and Chinese culture are found throughout the textbooks. Textbooks and workbooks are available in simplified or traditional characters.

Product Details

• Paperback: 4 pages
• Publisher: Cheng & Tsui; 1 edition (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887272622
• ISBN-13: 978-0887272622
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,356,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good choice, November 21, 2002

By 

Zachary Turner (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1: Textbook (Traditional Character Edition) (Level I Traditional Character Texts) (Paperback)

This book is quite good. I've studied Japanese for a long time and have gone to great lengths to find a good book for learning it, and it took me about 15 books. I thought that would be the case with Chinese as well, so you can imagine my surprise when the first book I tried actually turned out to be good. This was actually the textbook we used for my class, and although I haven't used many other Chinese textbooks, I would highly recommend this one. There are a number of good points about this book, and a few bad ones:

Pros
1) The vocabulary presented is fairly useful, and the early chapters really do start you off with useful vocabulary. Not like some books where you learn how to say "rainy season" in chapter 1.
2) The accompanying workbook is excellent. The only studying you need to do is the workbook exercises. With languages usually I have to study alot, and do many of the exercises twice, but with this book, I simply do the workbook exercises once and I really feel like I know the material.
3) Although this book romanizes all dialogs, the later books do not. This is a _good_ thing. Believe me, after learning 2,000 Japanese words from a book that puts the phoenetic transcriptions everywhere, you'll be glad to put in the extra effort to simply learn how to read and write the characters early on. I can't stress this enough. Although it may seem hard at first to memorize and learn how to write 30 or 40 characters for each chapter, you will definitely be glad you did. Imagine getting to the point where you know 1,500 words and then deciding hey, I sure wish I knew how to read and write.

Cons
1) The grammar explanations aren't terribly descriptive. It turns out that for much of the grammar they are teaching there's many variants of the same pattern, which they don't teach. So you're stuck if somebody switches around the word order on you. Furthermore, they teach by pattern rather than by grammar. It's great to know "this is the pattern to use when you want to say this", but it's also nice to know that the function of a certain word is to turn an adjective into an adverb, which you won't get from this book.
2) Sometimes the vocabulary can be presented in a weird order. For example, they will teach you the word fast in one chapter, and slow in another chapter. Eat in one chapter, drink in another chapter. Similar words should be grouped. This is of course, what they try to do but it could be done a little better.
3) The glossary in the back is very annoying. There is simply no English->Chinese glossary. Good luck figuring out how to say a certain word in Chinese, because you'll have to scan through _every_ single word in the Chinese->English portion of the glossary until you find it, and you'll probably accidentally skip over it anyway.

Overall though this is a solid book, and I would recommend it. Note that _the_ best book on Chinese is Beginner's Chinese, by Yong Ho. It is simply the best. Buy it. It's insanely cheap, and unbelievably well written.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars No longer the best, February 2, 2005

By 

John Broglio (Florence, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1: Textbook (Traditional Character Edition) (Level I Traditional Character Texts) (Paperback)

I have used Integrated Chinese (IC) for a semester. This fall I changed to the Interactions/Connections series. My reasons and recommendations are given below.

I do not recommend Integrated Chinese (IC). Teachers may like it because all the course materials come in the each set of books: Textbook, Workbook, Character Workbook. The problem: the pedagogy and the Chinese is out-of-date, the dialogues are poorly written, the grammar explanations and exercises are not great and the audio CDs are poorly structured and poorly recorded. I recommend only the Character Workbook from IC

As an example, here is a translation of the first dialogue from IC.
IC-I Dialogue 1
Mr. Wang: Hello!
Miss Li: Hello!
Mr Wang: May I ask your last name?
Miss Li: My last name is Li. What's yours?
Mr Wang: My last name is Wang, Peng Wang. What is your (whole) name?
Miss Li: My name is You Li.

Now, here is a translation of the first dialogue from an alternative course: Interactions/Connections by Yan & (J. L-C. Liu

Interactions I Dialogue 1
[young] Gao: Hey! Li, what day are you going to register on?
[young] Li: I'll register tomorrow. What about you? Today?
Gao: No. I'll register the day after tomorrow. Classes start next Monday.
Li: Isn't next Monday August 31st?
Gao: No. Next Monday is August 30th, not the 31st.
Li: August 30th isn't your birthday, is it?
Gao: No. My birthday is August 23rd, day before yesterday. What day is your birthday?
Li: I'm August, too. August 26th -- tomorrow.
Gao: Happy birthday!

The Interactions/Connections dialogue is meatier and more challenging. More important, it is real people talking conversational Chinese, and it has strong rhythm and comic and dramatic values (mistaken dates). Those contrasts continue throughout the books. The most common comments from a native Chinese speaker when reading
a) Interactions or Connections: "Yes! That's the way we talk."
b) IC: "Well ... we usually don't say it that way."

The IC dialogues are extremely dull, not really colloquial and have very stilted rhythm. Ideally, you want to MEMORIZE the dialogs in a language course, so you burn the speech patterns into your brain. I challenge anyone to do that with the Integrated dialogs.

AUDIO: I haven't heard the Interactions/Connections CDs so I can't comment on whether they are worth the $100 (Indiana University publisher). The IC CDs are pretty bad. They seem to have been made from a cassette master. The have poor miking and uneven volume levels -- when you turn the sound up high enough to hear the man's voice clearly, the distortion on the woman's voice will drive you nuts. The speaking pace is too fast for a beginning level, the pronunciation is not clear and the organization is poor. You can't listen to the tapes without the book in front of you: the vocabulary lists go: "Number 1: 'xiansheng'". Why they wasted precious space giving you a useless item number rather than the english meaning is one of the great mysteries of life.

DIFFICULTY: Interactions/Connections is a college-level course and it challenges you from the start. IC appears to be a high-school or middle-school level book. Not much meat, lots of repetition of vocabulary words from chapter to chapter (filler?).

PEDAGOGY: IC extremely old-fashioned -- circa 1950's. Interactions/Connections very up-to-date and cognitively savvy; especially note presentation of written characters, presentation of cultural material and snappy dialogue.

GRAMMAR: the Interactions/Connections grammar material is much clearer and more up-to-date.

EXERCISES: I stopped using the IC workbook pretty early on because the material was both excruciatingly boring and not useful/challenging enough. Level 1, Part 2 textbook exercises become so cryptic as to be useless. Not hard material, just inadequate editing.

Recommendation for beginners:
1. Start with at least Pimsleur Mandarin I (full course -- buy, borrow or rent) to get exemplary pronunciation and a strong aural base for the language.
2. Progress to Interactions I. Get a tutor to help you get into the first chapters, and give you information about Chinese culture and up-to-the minute expressions. (You will need a tutor or class for any course except Pimsleur audio courses.)
3. If you have a computer and you can afford it, get Wenlin3. It's worth every penny: built-in dictionary, rich character help and lots of readings. Palm and pocket computers also have very nice dictionaries and Chinese tools.

Non-beginners: If you are switching from IC to Interactions/Connections you may have to step back a couple of chapters to catch up. Get the previous book from the library if necessary.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cannot stress it enough, April 2, 2004

By 

Meng Peide (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1: Textbook (Traditional Character Edition) (Level I Traditional Character Texts) (Paperback)

I am currently studying in China right now, and this book as well as the second-year version formed the foundation of my Chinese. I have been studying Chinese for a little more than two years (almost all of which were in the U.S.) and I am now taking university courses at Tsinghua University. I cannot say enough good things about these books especially compared to other books like the Practical Chinese Reader. The only possible shortcoming (and that is if it is one) is that the grammar and phonetic explanations are sometimes unclear if you do not know the terms (although English is our mother tongue, so . . .), but very clear if you are familiar with English grammar. However, these words are very important if you ever study Chinese in China or use things like the Beijing University Press books which only use the Chinese words for these terms to explain grammar. I noticed that one person criticized the lack of English->Chinese glossary, but the implications and connations of words in Chinese are such that you require a Chinese dictionary to really understand them. My teacher constantly warned us about using an English-Chinese dictionary to find the words we were looking for. The first-year level of integrated Chinese gives you enough words and grammatical structures to survive and thrive in China upon first arrival, as well as flexible and reusable words to enable you to handle many situations.