Customer Reviews

A Trip to China (Two Vols.: Text Book & Vocabulary Book)

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I used this book as a 2nd year college text. I found it to contain a large number of useful words and well grouped into subject based lessons. It provided good insights into some aspects of life in China that made those lessons more interesting. The lessons use pinyin pronunciation guide. The simplified and classical reader is useful for any student. Grammar explainations are adequate and with a fair number of expamples. The examples do occasionally use complicated characters not yet learned and are in simplified only. The one drawbck I found is the vocabulary and grammer guides are separated into the back of both books, a nuisance. Over all it is a good text, consistent, easy to read and has clearly printed characters. One of the more useful books I have used in 4 years of classes.

A Trip to China attempts to tackle issues a typical American college student would face when studying in China. This book pulls it's punches on big issues like democracy and unemployment but is long on social commentary on issues such as hygiene, privacy, and ethics. This book could do a better job introducing vocabulary seen in science, technology, medicine and sports and a little less on college and institution life. Additionaly the binding on these books is very poor. A strong point of these books is their currency (writen in '95) which beats just about everything else out there.

One of the primary advantages of this book is that the lessons, by and large, are not very long, the average lesson containing a little over one page of text. There are 36 lessons in all, with fairly interesting topics ranging from the lack of toilet paper in Chinese public restrooms to the Cultural Revolution to a discussion of whether or not this textbook itself is a good teaching tool.

The book is accessible to anyone who has had a one year course in Chinese. The lessons are separated into two books: one contains the text and the other contains vocabulary, grammar and exercises. The vocabulary is generally pretty comprehensive, and in many cases gives the individual meanings of characters that make up a word or phrase. The grammar section generally includes a short explanation and two or three example sentences for each major grammatical point and just a short explanation for minor grammatical points. The exercises vary from true/false to straightforward question/answer to translations to suggestions on performing skits and going to various places to engage in conversations with Chinese speakers (which is a lot easier to do if you happen to be in China).

Overall, this should be a good book for a second year Chinese course, or (as in my case) as a supplementary tool to strengthen Chinese proficiency .