Customer Reviews

New Practical Chinese Reader: Textbook Vol.3

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

 

 

Based on the classic Chinese textbook Practical Chinese Reader, the New Practical Chinese Reader is finally here. In this complete revision of the old text (in fact, it is a completely new book, not a simple revision), the student will go through a total of six volumes, taking the student from the beginning level to the end of the intermediate level. Six books in all, the whole set is intended to cover three years of college-level instruction. The layout is excellent and the content is interesting; the first three volumes contains dialogues and expository text (volumes 4-6 is not yet released) that introduce the reader to aspects of Chinese culture and communication, and in keeping with the old Practical Chinese Reader, the grammatical explanations are excellent and clearly illustrate the usage of Chinese grammar. Furthermore, the new volume is written with the HSK guidelines in mind, so if you are planning to take this test, this is the textbook for you. Overall, this is probably the best textbook for English speakers to learn Chinese. Note: simplified characters are used; the grammar in the first three volumes corresponds more or less to the grammar covered in volumes 1-2 of the old Practical Chinese Reader, the vocabulary selection, however, is completely updated to cover usage of Chinese today.

[Volume 1: 7561910401; Volume 2: 7561911297; Volume 3: 756191251x]

I have used the original Practical Chinese Reader series and found it very useful. I was so impressed with this new textbook and workbook. There are many improvements over the old series.
1. The book is simply larger and easier to read.
2. Chinese characters are intoduced and reinforced in a very effective way. The meaning of character parts is well-explained.
3. Grammar and usage are much more clearly explained.
4. The book uses homophones (some with the same tone, some different) to highlight the importance of proper tones.
5. The workbooks and actvities are interesting and they have really helped me retain the material. The old series activities were too formulaic and boring.
6. The lessons are longer (14 lessons in Book 1 versus 30 lessons in the old series). This gives you more time to actually use the material in different ways. I find it more effective.

I'll be finished with Book 2 in a few weeks and look forward to using all 6 books in the series.

Good luck with your Chinese study.

This book series is alright if you want to learn how to speak Mandarin, but I would say its approach to learning to read and write is flawed. Chinese is a component language, and you're supposed to build up from easier characters to harder ones.

Because this book is organized by conversational topics, you learn relatively difficult characters along side very easy ones. The thing about Chinese is that a lot of the harder characters are MADE UP OF the smaller ones! So it makes a lot more sense to build up rather than learn hard and easy at the same time. That doesn't encourage thinking while writing Chinese, but rather flat memorization, which isn't the point of learning a language. Learning a language expands beyond immediate practical needs, and should teach students to think more critically and globally.

Also, this book is in SIMPLIFIED CHINESE. It has the traditional characters in the back of the book, but sometimes they're wrong, and the book doesn't teach you how to write them.

The workbooks of this series also don't teach you completely how to write the characters step-by-step. It's kind of a half-assed approach to explaining the steps in writing the characters.

This series is good for teaching people to speak, but not to write.

This is the third volume in the NPCR series, a well written and structured Chinese language textbook for non-native speakers. If your high school, college or university does not have a chinese language program you are missing out.