Customer Reviews

Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar

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

 

 

I have owned and used this book for about 6 years. The coverage is good, and there are detailed descriptions and discussion of each of the pheonomena covered. The greatest strength (for linguists) is the diagnostic tests used to demonstrate what lexical/grammatical category a word or phrase belongs in. The weaknesses are that a) it is not concise; b) everything is presented only in romanization; c) The descriptive terms are sometimes odd or outdated seeming. For example the chapter on "de" postverbal phrases has some long, strange title. To readers of current linguistic literature, these would more handily be classed as "resultative phrases" to capture the similarity with phenomena in many other languages. If you want a succinct reference/descriptive grammar (for example for developing computational linguistic applications) "Essential Chinese Grammar" by Yip and Rimmington is a better choice.

This is a good book for a student of Chinese at the high-intermediate level or above as a supplementary grammar. It's too long-winded and difficult to use as a practical look-up guide to help when you help forming a given sentence for your homework assignment. It's not a dictionary of grammar "how to's". The books by Yip and Rimmington are better for that.

Instead, it's good background reading on the "why's" of the language after you already know the "how to's". For example, you can read the chapter on aspect and gain a deeper understanding of the logic of why certain sentences work and others don't and where the subtleties lie. For this book is more of a scholarly, systematic analysis of Mandarin grammar than a "teach yourself" guide.

Li and Thompson are progressive rather than conservative in what they accept as sayable. Some sentences I've never come across in my several years of learning Mandarin. So I'm not surprised that some native speakers have called the grammar in this book wrong. The reason is that Li and Thompson haven't limited their grammar to reflect what's typical in Mandarin, but have tried to include what is POSSIBLE. They don't just include "standard Putonghua" but have included controversial uses and regional variations. In fact, Li and Thompson freely admit in their preface that some native speakers will disagree with some of the sentences in this book while other native speakers will disagree with other sentences. Mandarin has never been totally uniform and certain usages remain controversial and non-universal. I have often found textbooks disagreeing with each other. I also have found native speakers disagreeing with each other too.

As others have written, the tone of this book is scholarly, and not easily digestible, and there are no Chinese characters, only pinyin (but what's the problem with that? There is never any chance of mistaking one word for another since each Chinese word is translated into English). If you can live with these shortcomings, I recommend this book for more serious, academically-orientated students as a supplement to your other grammar books.

If you are limited to a traveler's "501 Useful Chinese Phrases," or are involved in a crash course in commercial Chinese for business purposes only, this is probably not the book for you. If, however, you are enrolled in formal classroom study and/or are using one of the higher quality computer language instruction programs, you will find this a valuable tool in your studies. This volume does presume some linguistics (you might have to look up a phrase or two--like "sentence sandhi") however, this is not a fatal obstacle to profitable use of this book. The inclusion of incorrect usage along with examples of correct usage is a little quirky, but it is often valuable to see bad or ungrammatical usage along with proper grammar and how easy it is in some instances to fall into ungrammatical expression. All in all an excellent companion to the study of Chinese.

This does not pretend to be a review but just an advise for people like me who thought they would find any chinese characters inside this book: there are none. I bought the book to use it as a complement to my chinese studies but found to my absolute surprise that it doesn't contain even a single chinese character (except the ones in the front cover) making its study extremely difficult. I really appreciate the work the authors have done and I don't have anything to say about the book as such but I find it sad that the examples are written in romanized chinese instead of chinese characters. As this is not a compalint about the book but about the presentation, I'd rather not assign any stars to it.[...] Hmmmm..., it seems they force me to do so. Let me then be impartial and assign three...

True to the title, this is indeed a nice reference book on
Chinese grammar, something I would like to keep on my
bookshelf next to the dictionaries. It is easy to read,
at least for a student with some experience of reading
grammar books and a prior exposure to basic linguistic
terminology. A large number of both positive and negative
examples are helpful in making grammar rules easier to understand.

Now, two minor complaints. First, if the authors were to prepare
a new edition, I wish they had used page space a bit more
economically. It seems that by slightly tightening spacing
between the words in the examples, many examples that
now stretch to 2 or 3 lines could be compressed into one or two.
Doing this could significantly reduce the page count.

Or, even better, the freed space could be used to give
parallel text in Hanzi (Chinese characters) next to each
example. One would think that with moder typesetting that
would not be too complicated, unlike in 1981, when the book
first appeared. While Hanzi are not strictly necessary --
tone marks and Englsih translation of every word allows one to
look any word in a dictionary -- printing them next to the
examples would provide additional visiual cues to those
readers who already know their characters, and an additional
opportunity to learn useful characters (e.g., the three
different "-de" suffixes) "by osmosis" to those who are still
learning.

the book is actually brand new. But the problem with the very thin paper packaging caused the top corner of the book got squizzed and wavy. a bit disappointed. The other book that I ordered came in a good box, well-protected and not a bit scratch. The store should take care of the book packaging carefully.

This item is intended for serious scholars of Chinese (that is, people with some formal linguistic training) who wish a better understanding of the complications of Mandarin grammar. Li and Thompson discuss many of the difficulties in classifying the different aspects of Chinese grammar and are able to relate those discussions back to interpreting those constructs. Graduate students in linguistics-related fields will find this volume easier to read than most grammar books and more enlightening than might be expected.
On an interesting note, this reference uses the pinyin alphabet in its examples rather than characters, an editorial choice that keeps it accessible to non-native speakers of Chinese. While I would prefer the use of characters, this preference doesn't detract from the accessiblity of the examples.
Final note: If you're simply wanting to learn how to speak Chinese better, many of the discussions in this book will only be tangentially relevant to your goals. And if your interest in Chinese is hitting on Beijing locals while drinking in the Sanlitun area, buying a few rounds will accomplish that better than an inch-thick grammar book.

The book describes Mandarin grammar very well. The explanations are a bit wordy, but understandable and the numerous examples are quite useful

I must say I was very disappointed with this weighty tome on Chinese grammar. It's authors insisted on quoting every previouse Chinese grammatician to such an extent that it proved difficult to read between the lines. Granted they try to cover a very difficult subject but the inclusion of 'wrong grammar' examples only further added to the confusion as I tried to read this. I am sure there is some useful information to be gained form this book, but be warned you will need a lot of patience. This is something I have not!

I bought this "Functional Reference Grammar" just because I wanted to own one concise grammar with plenty of examples and clear explanations of some complicated chinese grammar parts. It was a big surprised when I found out that in Chinese grammar book are no Chinese characters. It is quite obvious it makes the book nearly useless because Chinese language cannot exist without Chinese characters. I didn't explore the book anymore and I do higly recommend "Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar" by Claudia Ross.