I was looking for some books to learn Chinese from and I’m not sure what to buy. Should I even be buying books? Classes are too expensive. I currently have the Pimsleur mp3 course and since I’m living in Taiwan, I have language exchange in person twice a week.
One Chinese person said the 2 best books to get are: Practical Chinese and Far East Everyday Chinese. I couldn’t find the first one but I did find the Far East book. It looks like it’s a course in itself. The student book is 600NT, and there is also a workbook, a CD and a Character guide. All of these come out to $1600NT! ($60Cnd) That seems like quite a lot to me!
I’ve been using the Practical Audio-Visual Chinese series for a long time and I really enjoy it. I would definitely buy the vcd’s. They make the book a little more interesting. Best of luck in your studies.
One Chinese person said the 2 best books to get are: Practical Chinese and Far East Everyday Chinese. I couldn’t find the first one but I did find the Far East book. It looks like it’s a course in itself. The student book is 600NT, and there is also a workbook, a CD and a Character guide. All of these come out to $1600NT! ($60Cnd) That seems like quite a lot to me!
What books or methods have worked well for you?[/quote]
I’m using the Far East Everyday Chinese books right now. Yeah, you got a point when you say they’re expensive. However, rest assured, there’s enough in there to keep you occupied for at least a year, especially if you’re also gonna do the character guide. So, NT1600 over a period of 6 months to a year [which is the mimimum time it’ll take you to go through the materials] is not too bad. So my humble opinion, the books are good. Regarding the best method, I think it depends but for me a qualified, experienced Chinese teacher works best. The teacher I use right now is from one of the universities in Taipei and I see her 4 hours per week. She’s a little like a drill sergeant, but exactly what I need.
One Chinese person said the 2 best books to get are: Practical Chinese and Far East Everyday Chinese. I couldn’t find the first one but I did find the Far East book. It looks like it’s a course in itself. The student book is 600NT, and there is also a workbook, a CD and a Character guide. All of these come out to $1600NT! ($60Cnd) That seems like quite a lot to me!
What books or methods have worked well for you?[/quote]
I’m using the Far East Everyday Chinese books right now. Yeah, you got a point when you say they’re expensive. However, rest assured, there’s enough in there to keep you occupied for at least a year, especially if you’re also gonna do the character guide. So, NT1600 over a period of 6 months to a year [which is the mimimum time it’ll take you to go through the materials] is not too bad. So my humble opinion, the books are good. Regarding the best method, I think it depends but for me a qualified, experienced Chinese teacher works best. The teacher I use right now is from one of the universities in Taipei and I see her 4 hours per week. She’s a little like a drill sergeant, but exactly what I need.
One Chinese person said the 2 best books to get are: Practical Chinese and Far East Everyday Chinese. I couldn’t find the first one but I did find the Far East book. It looks like it’s a course in itself. The student book is 600NT, and there is also a workbook, a CD and a Character guide. All of these come out to $1600NT! ($60Cnd) That seems like quite a lot to me!
What books or methods have worked well for you?[/quote]
I’m using the Far East Everyday Chinese books right now. Yeah, you got a point when you say they’re expensive. However, rest assured, there’s enough in there to keep you occupied for at least a year, especially if you’re also gonna do the character guide. So, NT1600 over a period of 6 months to a year [which is the mimimum time it’ll take you to go through the materials] is not too bad. So my humble opinion, the books are good. Regarding the best method, I think it depends but for me a qualified, experienced Chinese teacher works best. The teacher I use right now is from one of the universities in Taipei and I see her 4 hours per week. She’s a little like a drill sergeant, but exactly what I need.
The above mentioned book indeed only helps you about the “how to write characters’” part, I don’t recommend it as a guide on Which characters to learn. The most common ones appear much too late in the book, others are anchient forms which are no longer used today but the author doesn’t mention that bit.
If you want to learn characters based on their use today, I recommend a book that goes like “chinese 3000” or something like that. It lists the 3000 most common characters, each with an index that says how often it is used nowadays (like the wo (I) is on position 10 or so).
I have and like this book. I think Practical Audio-Visual 1 has a lot of basic vocabulary and grammar, but I never really got into studying book 2 very hard. The best thing to do is find out what works best for you and run with it.
Some people like writing words over and over again, some listening to CDs, others just speaking, etc. I liked using flash cards to memorize a lot of vocabulary and then going out on the streets and using it (that’s still what I do).
Yeah, that’s the book. I used it to fill the gaps I had in the 2000 most commonly used characters. It’s also nice for assessing how many characters you really know.
Miltownkid, how is your chinese doing anyway? Weren’t you the guy who went hardcore on character learning and wanted to learn like 2000 in half a year? Did it work out? Did you reach my goal of being able to effortlessly read a newspaper?
Yes I was that guy, but I ran into a little foo foo half way through
I did make a Palm version supermemo (www.supermemo.com) database for the 3000 most commonly used characters. I lost it last year (we’ll call it PC trouble) but a friend I gave it to asked me how he could give it to someone else on MSN about 2 weeks ago, I have it back now. So I’m trying again.
I’ve already gone through a little over 1000 characters and I’m pretty sure it won’t take more then half a year to finish the rest from where I am now (a lot of characters look almost exactly the same with different tones).
I can read the paper, but not very well. It’s still outside of my easy reading domain.
When I recovered from my foo foo (don’t ask ) my Chinese was good enough to do mostly everything I wanted to do (read: wasn’t as interesting to me), so I slowed down a lot. Something sparked my interest again, so I’m getting back into it.
Here’s my current Chinese learning History:
2 semesters in University using Integrated Chinese
Long Break
1 semester of Chinese level one again
Another long break
Self Study in Taiwan for about a year (with 3 months of classes at The Mandarin Daily News in the middle)
Another Long break
2 semesters at Shida
Now back to self study using my elementary’s schools textbooks and supermemo. I think I’ll just work my way through elementary-high school textbooks at a leisurely pace now.
That all started about 5-6 years ago and I’ve been here for 2.
I’m not sure how to rate my current level but I can: read menus, signs and stupid messages that pop up in Windows (Chinese OS); call tech support and use Chinese (with a dash of English for vocabulary); watch cartoons , I’ve noticed that watching the news isn’t too hard, but it’s not as interesting as the cartoon channel is (it’s mostly the vocabulary that gets me, but the pictures help that)
Hey Miltown! I created a database for the 3000 characters too. Damn, that sucked. We should have cooperated on that one, would have saved a lot of effort. I’m the one who made that radicals database, way back when, if you remember. I’m just trying out Supermemo 2004 for PC right now, since I got sick of those crappy characters on Palm. PC version is sort of poorly-designed, not intuitive to use, and unfortunately doesn’t have any way to import the database or it’s original Excel file.
I’ve been asking around to see which books the language schools use. In general, this is what I came up with:
Beginner: Far East Everyday Chinese Book I - Book II- B
Intermediate: Practical A/V Chinese 2 - Far East Everyday Chinese Book III
Advanced: Choose your own!
Does this sound right or would the Practical Chinese be a better bet for a beginner? I’m going to buy one of the above mentioned books tomorrrow if I can find them.
) my Chinese was good enough to do mostly everything I wanted to do (read: wasn’t as interesting to me), so I slowed down a lot. Something sparked my interest again, so I’m getting back into it.