A to Z grammar for Chinese language learners, good book?

Language Learning Chinese
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16191643534161017329903712177099
161916435341610173299037121770993120Ă—4160 2.68 MB

Has anyone used this book to learn or improve their Chinese? If yes, opinions?

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We all have different learning styles and requirements, saying first :wink: I went through it once at Elite in Taichung, if I am not wrong, but eventually decided not to buy it for two reasons.

  1. The alphabetical order is convenient for a quick reference, but it does not allow for a comparison between words or particles belonging to the same category. I find a classification by topic more effective to learn grammar.
  2. I prefer to use grammar books whose authors are not native speakers. I find their explanations more in-depth since they also learnt the language and experienced first-hand how the brain of a non-native speaker reacts to Chinese sentence structures.
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This site isn’t bad if you want to organize your learning by grammar points and need an explanation of each.

The Li and Thompson book is a pretty standard reference among linguists (with other ones, of course – not like it’s the only thing out there) and some intermediate+ students say it is helpful.

Of course it will be no surprise to anyone who’s read this site that I’m not a big supporter of organizing learning around grammar points. Textbooks tend to take a certain order of presenting grammar points that isn’t really backed up by performance in students who are exposed to those grammar points in speech and reading, but I guess they have to organize themselves somehow. Most ESL textbooks left a grammar-oriented syllabus behind a long time ago, but CSL takes some time to catch up (even having far less grammar to worry about, which is kind of ironic.)

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Thanks for the replies! @boaz25 maybe you have a book to recommend as well? My level is (low) intermediate, I went through the 5 beginners books but by myself (didn’t go to NTNU), I memorized probably 95% of the vocabulary but my big weakness is grammar as I was lazy to properly learn how to make correct sentences.

By the way I stayed in Elite for like one hour to read the beginning of “A to Z” and noticed quickly in the first pages that the explaining was much more satisfactory for me. So I think I will buy it anyway, even though you have a point about alphabetic order.

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Glad that you find something suitable. In the end it really is super subjective :grinning: I have yet to find my ideal grammar, actually. Gathering information here and there, but never explained in the way that I like.

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