Customer Reviews

Open For Business: Lessons in Chinese Commerce for the New Millenium 1: Textbook and Exercise Book

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

 

 

I actually had Prof. Jane Kuo as an instructor in graduate school and, naturally, used this book as an accompanying text. While its nice to have the author as your teacher I still go back to the text again and again for key business terminology. There simply isn't a better guide to modern business that is Western friendly. You could say I am biased but I have looked around for other decent texts on business and this remains at the top. The text is especially instructive for overseas businessmen/women who plan on staying competitive in an increasingly Sino-centric cycle.

A word of warning: Cheng & Tsui's books are tailor-made for Western students and contain almost as much English as they do Chinese. While this makes the books faster to read, their convenience comes at the expense of creating distance between the student and the language.

This set of books was obviously made to fill the growing market for business-oriented Chinese, it's just too bad you will never use any of the content in this book to actually do business. What it gives you is an introduction to reading economic articles in magazines or newspapers, basic vocabulary and grammar to describe macro-economic developments and market trends, and a general introduction to the various aspects of the Chinese market. This makes it basically useless in actual work situations.

On the cover it says the book is directed towards more advanced students but the vocabulary and texts are exceedingly simple and will not benefit students who are already at a decent level. All in all, my institute is very disappointed with "Open for Business" and will drop it from the curriculum next semester.

The books' sole redeeming feature is the inclusion of thorough explanations of grammar structures and homonyms at the end of each lesson. I especially found the example sentences demonstrative and useful. If you buy the book, do it for a more thorough understanding of written Chinese, for doing business, look elsewhere.