Advanced Chinese

....This series is still the best around. (See reviews for Beginning Chinese, Int. Chinese, and all the other books in the DeFrancis Series.) John DeFrancis writes that he designed "Beginning Chinese" for all students, "Intermediate Chinese" for students planning to mainly use the spoken language (the book is all pinyin, though you can buy the character text also), and "Advanced Chinese" for those who want pursue a more scholarly approach. I would say that anyone who wants to read anything in Chinese should get this book. I used "Beginning" and "Intermediate" (studying by myself at home) to prepare myself for the second-year Chinese courses at my local community college. I thought that would be enough, but the text my college used for 4th semester Chinese, "Taiwan Today," was extremely difficult. Now that I am halfway through this textbook, I realize that a lot of the words and phrases that threw me in "Taiwan Today" are advanced phrases used almost exclusively in writing (wen2yan2 rather than bai2hua4). And, whereas in "Taiwan Today," they were either given only a short definition or even introduced in the text only without definition, here in "Advanced Chinese," these wen2yan2 words and phrases are defined meticulously, featured in several example sentences, and then used several times more in the following lessons. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that a lot of non-native learners of Chinese who do learn to speak it fluently, usually by going to school in China or Taiwan, end up hitting some sort of glass ceiling when it comes to reading. I'm not sure about this - I haven't met that many Westerners who have even reached the speaking level! - but I'm hoping to avoid future difficulties by hunkering down with this book. Beyond its usefulness, it also "hen3 you3 yi4si." In this text, our friend Mr. Bai is continuing his studies in Beijing. His school has decided to supplement the curriculum by offering 20 lectures on Chinese culture and language. Each chapter features a dialogue in which Mr. Bai and his teacher talk about academic and personal matters, all the while going through the new vocabulary list, and then a text of the lecture proper. Then there's a grammar review, some review sentences, review questions and, very cleverly, a text of Mr. Bai's supposed audiotaped "Fu4Shu4," or summation of the previous chapter's lecture. (That way, you also are reviewing the previous chapter. Apparently this audiotaped review is or was a suggested method for learning Chinese.) Using these methods, the book offers an extremely, in fact meticulously thorough grounding. If you really want to learn Chinese written grammar (and not just be playing a guessing game as to how all those short little grammatical words affect the overall meaning of a sentence), try this book. (Don't forget to get the "Character Text to Accompany Advanced Chinese" also. The audiotapes, too, are still available through Seton Hall University.) In a few years, I'll try to com