Customer Reviews

Speak Mandarin, Workbook (Yale Language Series)

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This book was the primary text to my course in college. Within weeks, students developed small, but functional speaking vocabularies. Though the Yale system of romanization is used for this book, its phonetic system properly trains the vocals for Beijing Mandarin. It is personally felt that after first learning Yale romanization, conversion to Pinyin and Wade-Jiles is a simple adjustment which creates a more universal Mandarin Chinese Student.

This book was the primary text to my course in college. Within weeks, students developed small, but functional speaking vocabularies. Though the Yale system of romanization is used for this book, its phonetic system properly trains the vocals for Beijing Mandarin. It is personally felt that after first learning Yale romanization, conversion to Pinyin and Wade-Jiles is a simple adjustment which creates a more universal Mandarin Chinese Student.

It came as a surprise to find that this living fossil is still in print. It was the first textbook I ever used when I studied Chinese in college and as an introduction for absolute beginners, it really isn't too bad. How times have changed. At that time the Speak Chinese and Read Chinese series, as well the much more thorough and comprehensive DeFrancis series, were pretty much it as far as college level texts. The twenty lessons take the learner through the most fundamentally important sentence patterns and everything is explained very simply and clearly. The dialogues at the start of each lesson aren't scintillating, but they are effective in illustrating the points of grammar covered in the lesson. But for this book to really have a niche in the contemporary ecosystem of Chinese studies, some work will have to be done: CDs are an absolute must, the vocabulary should be brought up to date, and the Yale system of romanization needs to take its place in the attic along with the IBM Selectric, the rotary phone and the puhch card. It's true that it's a much more intuitively grasped system of transcription for English speakers than pinyin (it was developed at Yale to teach American servicemen during World War II) but that really isn't the point. World War II was over a long time ago. Pinyin is the standard.