Customer Reviews

New Practical Chinese Reader: Textbook 1

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although the quality of the lessons seems excellent, and the audio CDs for the textbook are very clear, I wish I had not purchased the workbook.

The workbook has various exercises such as matching the pinyin to the sound, matching the characters to the pinyin, writing the characters, completing sentences, and such like. The first puzzlement came when I listened to the audio CDs I bought with the textbook; there is nothing on them that resembles the "match the pinyin to the sound" exercises. The second puzzlement came when I tried to find the answer key in the workbook. After more research on Amazon and elsewhere, I was able to piece together what you would need to make a complete set just for book one:

New Practical Chinese Reader Textbook 1, $19.95
New Practical Chinese Reader Textbook 1 Audio CDs, $29.95
New Practical Chinese Reader Workbook 1, $12.95
New Practical Chinese Reader Workbook 1 Audio CDs, $16.95
New Practical Chinese Reader Workbook 1 Instructor's Manual, $14.95 (Amazon has it, but it's hard to find)
New Practical Chinese Reader Workbook 1 Instructor's Manual Audio Tape, $9.95 (Amazon doesn't have this; I found it at www.chinabooks.com)

I have nothing negative to say about the quality of the lessons, but I wish I had known how many things I needed to buy to make the workbook usable.

It would be good if Amazon would disclose this somewhere in its editorial descriptions of the books.

I have mixed feelings for this book. Coming from a Chinese background (and having the ability to actually SPEAK Chinese fluently), the first six chapters were a breeze. It starts off with just some pinyin, so that's always there to guide. All of a sudden, chapter 7 takes away the guiding hand and puts you straight to characters! I didn't feel like I had a chance to absorb all the characters I had been expected to memorize in the first six chapters. I then decided to buy the workbook. Although the workbook isn't worth the price, it is helpful & I'd probably still buy it in hindsight. Unless you're in a class enviroment with supplementary work, the textbook alone won't be enough to help you with characters.

I should probably note that I'm going over the work myself as this is the textbook used at my uni and will be assumed knowledged for my Chinese class this coming semester. From my experience so far, using this book -- without classes & its weekly assignment -- a *lot* of discipline must be exercised & much hard work to progress through the chapters.

I've been studying Chinese in China for five months now with this textbook, and I've loved it. I'm on the 19th chapter right now, and really enjoying it. The text is quite well-organized and the teaching method solid. The way I use this text is to first memorize the characters, then go through the dialgues with the audio (copying most of the characters as I go) and then going through the vocabulary lists once. Then I spend 4-6 hours with a tutor per lesson going through the exercises in the textbook, and have my tutor correct my workbook exercises. My chinese teachers and friends like the textbook and say that the content is authentic and high-quality (even though I live in Guangxi province, in Southern China, where people sometimes get annoyed if I use the Beijing dialect used in this book :) I haven't gotten the Teacher's manuals, as they're difficult to get a hold of in China, but you're better off studying with a tutor if it's at all possible. My only complaint is that more help could be given when learning the characters - many times I have to do research using a dictionary to learn what some of the components are, and what the meanings of individual characters are.

I first bought this book from a university bookstore when beginning to learn Chinese to adopt from China. The lessons are simple, clear, challenging, nicely laid out, and progress nicely. If one bothers to do all the included work with characters, one learns to read them instead of being chained to pinyin (most of my fellow adopting moms seemed in awe of me even attempting to learn the characters, but it really is my favorite part... and what is reading chinese with out reading charcters?)

What I would like to add to the reviews here (and thankyou to the reviewer who pointed out all the various materials, including teachers manuals etc needed to actually properly use all the workbook material: it is true), is that this really is focussed on University Students. I learned how to ask how many students in a faculty, say what my major is, if the teachers were chinese or foreign etc. The characters meet in dormitories and cafeterias and have discussions with professors. I daresay I would have found all this wonderfully pertinent 20 plus years ago when I was a college student.

As a mom to a toddler, whose chinese I would like to keep, and who wants basic vocab for speaking on a daily basis with other kids and parents around the home, it is frustrating and seems very disconnected to what I need to know. I am currently making my way through various children's books with a few of the other excellent books available: Oxford English Chinese dictionary: learn to look up by pinyin and character radical and stroke #, and William MCNaughton and Li Ying's "Reading & Writing Chinese" which is an index of chinese characters and stroke order. This together with having a native chinese speaker come into the home to help with real-life vocab has turned me away from continuing with these "I am an arts major" books.

Anyways, this particular series is undoubtedly excellent, but not for everyone, being so college-topic based.

I first used the Practical Chinese Reader series in 1985 as a college textbook. The original books were green, fat, and printed on the cheapest of paper. Nonetheless, they were an excellent Chinese textbook series.

The new PCR's have kept the good points of the earlier readers and have improved upon them significantly. These improvements are the format, the quality of the dialogues, the references at the end of the book, and a first-rate 4-skills pedagogical approach. The authors of this book really do expect you to learn to speak, read, and write Chinese.

As a home study tool for a first time learner, the books are not great because they depend on having a university level instructor or advanced high school teacher to get you through the difficult parts. One of the earlier reviewers here noted this problem as the book suddenly morphs from pinyin to kanji. The workbooks are also superfluous and not useful. The CD's are a complete ripoff. There is a plethora of audio material available for free on the Internet.

Home learners should check out some of the excellent videocam Chinese lessons offered on the Internet, most of which come with their own textbooks, which are cheaper than PCR.[...] Their textbook was comparable to PCR in quality.

Bottom line: excellent textbook, shoddy ancillary materials, great for structured classroom, poor for home learning.

Although I don't think this book technically qualifies as a reader. I think it is an excellent book for beginners. It starts with text and is followed by new words. It includes notes on the texts, a grammar section for each chapter, drills and exercises, and also a section on writing characters including the stroke order. This would be an excellent companion to students studying beginners chinese in college.

This is a well organized book that makes learning easy. The text is arranged with a dialogue at the start of each chapter and with the new words & verbs embedded in the dialogue. Each chapter builds progressively on the last and there is enough English to bridge the gap so you will not be completely lost.
One criticism is that the basic survival language / useful travel phrases take a while to show up and the book would be better organized if we were exposed to more of that sooner. But, otherwise this is a good learning tool. I have just returned from 2 weeks in China and the material in this book served as a good foundation.

As a textbook, The New Practical Chinese Reader leaves much to be desired. The format of each chapter is as follows: Dialogue, vocabulary, random non-concise grammar points, some hanzi information, and a one paragraph culture tid-bit. I feel that where the textbook is lacking is in it's breakdown of the grammar. Dialogues are given but very little it said of actual syntactic structure as well as why and how things are said in Chinese. Occasionally, you are given an asterisk that tells you about a phrase. Also, there is very little that is ever said in regards to Chinese culture which is very important when learning a language. Culture gives back ground and answers many "whys?" to a language. I feel the textbook could have contained more information.

This textbook is the best book out there. However, that doesn't say much when there are so few textbooks for chinese. In comparison to many french/spanish/italian and other romantic languages, the textbooks available for them are of better quality.

This product is good and at the moment is still the best you can get however be warned, even with instruction which is where I use it at Northeastern University, chinese is not easy. Only buy it if you can at the minimum have a teacher, and even with a teacher, office hours or extra help is definitely recommended.

This is the best you can get out there today but there are still way too many flaws such as it being hard to understand and the large vocabulary needed. I personally wish the speed was half as much so volume 1 should have twice as many lessons after the first few lessons about pinyin for the amount of material it covered. If the speed was the same as the first few lessons, this would have been great. However, it goes quite fast and will be daunting especially since there's 4 volumes of this textbobok and it is hard to finish just 1.

I have started my Chinese studies from an other language book during a language course, but after a time we have changed to New Practical Chinese Reader, which was far more better. Maybe those who have studied English as foreign language like me agree that this is a good book. Its main story is about some students studying in Beijing, and the lessons are about their life. From the very first lesson there are enjoyable conversations and useful phrases, so we can have the impression of a rapid progression which is important for guarding the motivation. The lessons have good structures and a good balance of texts and exercises, each lessons contains model phrases and explanation for the stroke order. It is easy to follow the instructions. There are not too much new words in one lesson, so one can manage to study them lesson by lesson.