Beginning Chinese Reader, Part 1

In the 1960's, while Mr. DeFrancis was working on this series, he wrote an essay called "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese" (Journal of the Chinese Language Teaching Institute, Volume 1) in which he explains why a book like this is necessary and why he designed it the way he did. The reviews below pretty much restate it - you cannot learn to read Chinese just by memorizing a lot of individual characters. An example: ben3 means "root" or "self." Lai2 means "come." Di4 means "earth." Ren2 means "man." All simple words. But when combined, could you guess that benlai would mean "originally" or bendi would mean "this country" or benren would mean "myself, yourself, himself"? There are thousands and thousands of combinations of this sort that have to be learned separately from the individual characters or you will have no idea what you're reading. In addition, I would like to get something off my chest. Everyone tells you Chinese grammar is easy. It isn't! It's just different! Chinese uses word order instead of declensions, tenses, etc., to convey different meanings. If you get the word order wrong, you're saying something completely different from what you wanted to say. People will tell you word order in Chinese is a lot like English, which is true in simple terms, but a very dangerous generalization. "Bu hen hao," for instance, means not very good, but "Hen bu hao" means really bad. "Min2guo2" means republic but "guo2min2" (same characters) means citizen. In any kind of complex sentence (or even in simple ones) you need to be very familiar with common, habitual word order rules. There are too many of them to simply learn by rote. And that's not even mentioning the problem with particles like the infamous "le." You need to read a LOT of Chinese words in context to really learn these grammar rules. And the DeFrancis Chinese Reader Series has just that. These books are thick! Another reviewer below gave the number of characters in each volume, I think, and you can read above the dimensions of the book, so I won't repeat it here. The Readers also teach you the cultural significance of a lot of terms, a lot of idiomatic expressions, and a lot of historical and place names. And also I'll make the suggestion that you use these books in combination with his grammar texts, "Beginning Chinese," etc. The audiotapes for the whole series, including the Readers, is available from Seton Hall Language Lab. I don't think you can find any series more thorough. Some people will tell you these books are out of date because they were written in the late 1960's, but I haven't found that to be a problem at all. Grammar doesn't change much. A few words have changed, but really, you need to know the old words as well as the new. I mean, is anyone saying that English readers can't understand books written 50 years ago? The only form of language that changes that quickly is slang, and you're in trouble if you think that's language learning. Foreign language book publishers a

The DeFrancis series of books on Chinese includes "Beginning Chinese", "Character Text for Beginning Chinese", the two volumes of "Beginning Chinese Reader", and I think an intermediate book as well. While I am not thrilled with "Beginning Chinese" as a text (you can read my review on that book), I think that the readers are admirable. They are designed to teach the writing system on its own, independent of the course material in "Beginning Chinese", and yet there is a certain thematic continuity between the two books, so that they can be used as a supplement to each other. The Yale series used the same process in their earlier set of books, which are something of a classic in the field.The books start off teaching you ten characters a lesson. They build up from the simpler ones to the more complicated, and also drill you on forming words from the characters you already know (most Chinese "words", if you can use the term, consist of two characters, each with a meaning of its own).DeFrancis apparently produced the book "Character Text for Beginning Chinese" in addition to the Readers because some educators balk at the system of teaching the writing system independently, preferring to teach their students the words they learn to speak as they go along. I've tried both ways, and I really believe that it's a mistake not to treat the writing system as a separate subject with beginners. You can probably teach yourself to write from these books without too much trouble. However, learning to write Chinese is an aesthetic experience as well as a linguistic one, and I don't know how authentic your handwriting will be without a teacher. DeFrancis takes it about as far as you can in a book, reviewing the traditional ways that Chinese children are taught to write the component parts in a balanced way. The grammatical demands are minimal, since it's assumed that you're using other material for that part of the learning process. On the whole, a very creditable effort, which is no doubt one reason why it has survived as a standard text for so long.

This book is good for learning Chinese characters. Ten characters are introduced each lesson and then combined with ones learned in previous lessons. Chinese is often mistakenly called a monosyllabic language and this book shows the true way by showing how the characters can be combined different ways to form usable words. The characters introduced in this two book series are those most frequently used so by the end of the second book the author says you can recognize two-thirds of the characters used even though that is a small fraction of all Chinese characters. The font used in the book is especially big and clear so it's easy on the eyes. This book uses only the traditional form of the characters used in Taiwan and overseas; not the simplified form used in Mainland China.

First off, don't think that this 2-volume set will teach you to read Chinese by itself; it's designed as a companion to his "Beginning Chinese". Each of the 48 lessons is matched to a lesson in his "Beginning Chinese"; for example, before you study Lesson 10 in Beginning Chinese Reader, you need to have learned the grammar in Lesson 8 of "Beginning Chinese".The author stresses a couple of key points: Learning characters has to come AFTER the sound system and after at least some grammar has been introduced. And secondly, the number of characters you know is not nearly as important as the number of character combinations that you've learned, and the amount of practice that you've had with the characters.Each lesson introduces 10 new characters, and 20 to 40 character combinations built up from the new characters and characters previously learned. All the new characters are used in "Illustrative Sentences", which are translated into English at the end of the chapter. The bulk of each lesson consists of readings, both in dialogue form and expository prose.By the end of the 2 books, you will have learned app. 400 characters, and about 1,200 character compounds. But these are the most frequently utilized 400 characters; according to a study cited, these 400 characters account for 73% of all the characters found in books, periodicals, and other sources.The book uses traditional characters, although in the back of volume 2, the authors gives the simplified versions, and a small bit of practice using these. Like the companion "Beginning Chinese", the topics are somewhat dated ... you constantly read about so-and-so not having enough money to send his children to college. But overall, if you're seriously interested in the Chinese language, and you're willing to invest the time and energy to do it right, the DeFrancis series is the surest way to get a sound foundation in Chinese.