Customer Reviews

Integrated Chinese: Level 1, Part 1 Simplified Character Edition (Textbook)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I started learning Mandarin with the Pimsleur series then moved to learning out of books and this is by far the best choice that I have seen so far. It gives clear explainations of grammar, you learn a lot of new vocabulary in each section and there are good dialoges in the beginning of every section. The vocabulary is up to date that includes words for even popular soda brands like Coke and Sprite. I yet to see a better Mandarin learning course.

This is the best Chinese text book I've found on the market. The text is difficult but it's excellent for serious students who want to learn how to read, write and speak Chinese. If you just want to pick up a few Chinese words, this book may not be suitable for you.

After studying Chinese for over a year using pinyin, without learning to write Hanzi, I decided to start over with Integrated Chinese and learn to write Chinese characters. This book not only was a great review, but I was actually able to learn to write Hanzi quickly using this text. At the same time, audio related to the text has helped me learn to hear spoken Chinese much better. I am now working on Part 2, Level 1 which as a natural sequel. As in using any text, learning a language takes dedication and daily work.

As the other reviewers have mentioned this textbook/ CD/ workbook/character guide is very comprehensive in teaching Mandarin. It should be a definite consideration for a serious student.

On the negative side the authors lack some understanding of teaching principles. The start of the book in teaching sounds is rather horrible. For instance, consider this explanation of how to pronounce, 'd is a tongue tip alveolar unaspirated plosive. It is voiceless. f is a labio-dental fricative. To produce this sound...' Written by linguists for linguists. Fortunately there is the CD and the book gets better.

The more serious fault is the book is designed to learn each character as you learn the language. This has really slowed my learning of the spoken language, but I am sure if I continue will pay dividends later. I think this is good for someone already familiar with some Chinese characters - such as a Japanese speaker. But for me it is too much difficult to jump into characters full bore at the start.

Integrated Chinese is the good old reliable of chinese text series. Good for studying on your own and good for a class. Its integrated series of support material -- video, audio, workbooks -- is what really separates it from the field.

Now the entire Integrated Chinese program is absolutely fantastic! Although you can just buy the textbook, I highly recommend buying all the pieces if you want to extract everything you possibly can from this program. That being said, yes it does get slightly expensive but I highly recommend buying the textbook, character workbook, workbook, and CDs. With all of these incredibly useful learning materials, learning Chinese is made easy if you are dedicated enough. With all of them you can excel at reading, writing, speaking, and listening because countless amounts of exercises are provided in all of these fields. The combination of just simply listening to the vocab list on the cd while looking at the list in the textbook, makes it much easier to memorize all parts. This is an absolutley wonderful program, and I sincerely hope you find as much use and learn as much as i have from this!!!

I have studied a few different languages, and have seen my share of both good and downright crappy textbooks. This is one of the best I have seen for any language. Everything is presented logically and it is consistent throughout. It is a little unusual that the dialog goes at the very beginning of the chapter, but it is no problem. It made it very easy for me to self-teach for the first few chapters, so I was ahead when I took my first Chinese class.

I wasn't aware there were so many versions of this book and what I ordered wasn't what I needed for class - but compliments to the merchant for being pleasant and making it very easy for me to return the book! Great customer service.

I would strongly discourage anyone from buying this book. The translations in the book are often very ambiguous and confusing. The book often presents new grammar without explaining it. For the grammar it does explain it gives very few example sentences. If you look at the authors they are all Chinese. Regardless of how well they may speak English many points are still lost in translation. When learning a language every small grammatical detail should be broken down and explained. This book will explain the main details but will leave you to figure the rest out on your own.

The book we received was in horrible condition. Two pages were completely ripped out, there were pen markings throughout the book, and the cover was falling off. Additionally, some pages seemed to formerly have been waterlogged. That said, the shipping was on time, and the book content was valuable.