“Essential Chinese 1500” is the book specially designed for
self-directed Chinese language education. The book contains
a collection of 1500 essential Chinese sentences and 1156
essential Chinese words organized into 286 topics. The book
can be used as either a textbook for beginners’ self-directed
study or a quick reference manual for intermediate and
advanced level students on topic based usages.
The phonetics system used in this book is called “PinYin”,
the phonetics standard in mainland China. Each word and each
sentence in this book are described by unified five pieces
of information: (1). Simplified Chinese, (2). Traditional
Chinese, (3). romanized format PinYin, (4). computer format
PinYin, and (5). English translation. Each topic contains a
stand-alone vocabulary list, thus you can start anywhere
without the dependency on any other topics.
Doesn’t sound very suited for self-instruction if it’s another list of “useful sentences” and vocabulary, but hey…lulu.com is self-publishing after all. Perhaps selling this book as a supplement might be better? And…please…$57.00? A bit steep for this kind of thing, really. Maybe reconsider your pricing as well.
Looks like $40 to me, which for an ebook without any accompanying audio materials is still very expensive. Ridiculously expensive, IMO. I’d pay $40 for a good printed volume with 4 CD’s.
Throwing 1500 sentences in Pinyin at someone without adequate accompanying explanation of pronunciation isn’t going to be very helpful. The sentences chosen seem artificially constrained within a 5-character limit, and not all of them are suitable or particularly useful for beginners, as in 40 and 42 below. Here is an excerpt:
Rather than toss “apologize again” at a beginner, along with a dozen ways to apologize, wouldn’t it be better to be teaching just one or two ways at first, then move on? I’d rather see that space used for something else. If teaching zai4 (again) and ci4 (a time, an instance), wouldn’t it be more helpful to reinforce those concepts by showing them used in multiple ways, e.g., zai4 lai2! Zai4 yi1 ci4! Zai4jian4! and so on?
And how will the learner know how to pronounce the q, x, zh and so on? Does anyone really think self-study is possible without learning proper pronunciation, especially in a tonal language as difficult as Chinese?
I think there are better materials out there at a lower price. Printed ones that you can carry around with you, and ones that have accompanying audio materials.
Self-learning of Chinese sounds as impossible to me as regularly working out on a home gym. Seems like a good idea at first, but without the motivational factor of having to regularly face a teacher, and therefore do ones homework in advance (plus the help on pronounciation and answering of questions), it seems inevitably doomed to failure. I have my fair share of chinese books, flash cards and mp3 lessons sitting around at home attesting to that.
But my once-a-week, after-work, in-the-office, one-on-one classes are presently going very well.
There’s no description of tone sandhi either when two 3rd tones abut.
This book can surely benefit from an editor. In quickly browsing through the sample pages, I found two glaring errors:
馬馬虎虎 - ma3 ma3 hu5 hu5 (bottom of pg. 12): Wrong pronunciation. The two consecutive neutral tones are especially puzzling.
The traditional form of 什么 is not 什么 (pg. 19). Clearly, the author used a computer program to convert between simplified and traditional without (a) double checking the output, or (b) realizing that such programs typically do an incomplete job.
I’m no teacher but I think self-learning Chinese (beginning stages) is actually worse than not learning Chinese at all. I think you need a considerable amount of time to get the pronunciation and tones down which goes without saying is impossible if you’re teaching yourself. If you’re teaching yourself you will develop bad habits and will be much much more difficult to correct down the road whereas someone starting with a teacher will not have this problem.
I am never impressed when the title of a book has any phrases such as “teach yourself” or “do it yourself.” I couldn’t help but notice the price of the book has went down to $39.00…could the writer be reading our posts? I hope so…
The phrases are presented without any context. The translation is meaningless without the context in so many of their examples. “很抱歉 :I’m very apologetic” (just weird) vs. 很對不起? I wonder how man times they give a definition of a word, and then follow that with definitions of that word when you add 很,真, 非常, & 不。
If someone is going to be daring enough to teach themselves Chinese, this is not the book.
I am trying to teach myself Chinese and actually starting to make progress.
I would agree this book looks particularly useless. The main reason for me posting though is to refute the idea the two posters seem to have that it is not possible to learn Chinese with formal lessons etc. I use the Internet almost exclusively for this purpose and can assure you that now it is more than possible. I have also bumped into people in my web travels that have got considerably further than me in similar ways.
So if you really want to learn Chinese then a computer, a fast net connect and determination are mostly all you need even if living in a non-Chinese speaking country.
Having got that out of the way the book may be useful if traveling to some parts of China as I keep hearing you should carry your own toilet paper but is does seem somewhat expensive if that was the intention
“Essential Chinese 1500”, authored by Xin Xu, is the book specially designed for self directed study of Chinese language. The book teaches thousands of commonly used Chinese words and sentences in mainland China’s official Mandarin dialect, mainland China’s official standard Pinyin phonetics and written expressions of each word in both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
The book contains a collection of 1500 essential Chinese sentences and 1176 essential Chinese words organized into 286 topics involving the use of 828 commonly used Chinese characters. The book can be used either as a self-study textbook for beginners or a quick reference manual for intermediate and advanced level students and travelers seeking a usage by topic.
Sentences in this book are short, expressive and representative. The average length of sentences is five characters. The contents of the book are organized into conceptual topics. Each topic section contains a vocabulary list and a sentence list. The vocabulary list in each topic is stand-alone; thus you can start anywhere without any dependence on earlier topics.
By studying this book, your Chinese language learning process can be significantly shortened and simplified. By creatively varying, combining and applying the thousands of primitive words and sentences covered in this book, you can construct an unlimited number of new, compound and complex sentences. You will quickly gain confidence in understanding and speaking Chinese; you can even impress Chinese speakers and gain quick respect and friendship from them.
The E-Book version of the second edition of this book is currently available for downloading at amazon.com at the price of US$47. The audio edition of the book and its sequel “Intermediate Chinese 1500” will be available soon.
How has the second edition been changed to better serve the needs of learners of Chinese? Have the points brought forth by learners been addressed in the second edition?
(I’ve also edited your preview link so that it now works.)
I still do not see anything in this book that is not available in a Berlitz phrase book for less money. Sorry, but that’s the truth.
It’s hopeless ironlady. Do you even think that the author reads the posts on here? I bet it’s just a bot doing the postings here. The second edition has not eliminated any of the errors that were pointed out earlier and appears to be nothing more than just a new cover.
It would be nice if the author actually posted something more substantial on here than a total of two spams, such as a discussion on how this book can be used to help the novice student or why there still exists such glaring errors in the 2nd edition, but I wouldn’t bet the penny lying underneath the sofa cushion on this.
