Customer Reviews

Integrated Chinese, Level 1 Part 1 Textbook, 3rd Edition (Traditional)

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I bought this book because it was required for the beginning Mandarin class I'm taking in college. Part of the difficulty in learning Mandarin is learning how to use the appropriate tones for the words when speaking. The other difficulty is in learning to read Chinese, because reading characters which represent whole words is quite different than reading words made up of letters representing different sounds. As a result, I think learning to speak and learning to write Mandarin are two distinct skill sets, and I feel that the emphasis on writing which this book has doesn't benefit the beginning student as much as an emphasis on speaking would.

When we learn to speak as children, we have no clue how what we're saying is written, and when I learned French as a young child, we did no writing and no grammar at all. We spoke, played games, did skits, sang songs and learned simple conversations in French without ever seeing it written down or learning how to conjugate verbs, etc. As a result, I could speak a good amount of French and had a good accent by the time I took the beginning French class at school that included formal grammar and writing.

While I find Chinese characters fascinating, it's frustrating for me to be learning how to speak at such a slow pace and learning so few words because learning a new word means learning a new character. I find myself impatient to understand basic spoken Chinese and be able to converse at at least a basic level in Chinese at a faster rate than this book and the accompanying CDs provide.

I had taken Mandarin in the past, studied it on my own though various resources, so I wasn't flying in blind. Mainly, I've used the primary 2 texts. I don't understand why this is now a text, which was the text for my last college class. The video content (if you can get it), is actually decent, but it just cannot justify how horrible this text is. I've actually decided to opt out of Mandarin studies at my current school, because I just think this text is that abominable. I'm going to study privately.

The first one I ordered didn't come in, but I contacted the owner and were kind to send another book since the other one did not ship in :) Thank you.! perfect condition