Beginning Chinese

Forget Pimsleur and other chinese courses. If you really want to learn chinese, then Beginning Chinese was and still is the ultimate chinese textbook. Beginning Chinese doesn't offer you lively conversations written in natural Chinese but rather stupid conversations in unnatural Chinese. And in the stupid conversations written in unnatural Chinese lies the true strength of Beginning Chinese. It is not designed to entertain Chinese but to teach foreigners Chinese. In natural conversation you leave many things out if it is clear from the context. In the unnatural conversations of Beginning Chinese you will leave them in, because you first have to learn before you can them leave them out. That is why the conversations seems unnatural to the Chinese but they are really most helpful to you .

After reading the other reviews regarding "How the Chinese really speak", I asked my instructor what he thought. He explained that the communists forced unwelcomed changes to the Chinese language and it is because of communist rule that people don't speak exactly this way anymore. One example he mentioned is that communists demanded that the word for "girlfriend" also be word for "wife". He believes times are changing and the culture is slowly re-embracing the original ways of speaking Chinese. I am not an expert in Chinese affairs so I am not able to comment either way on that issue. For me, the book is well structured and easy to follow but I've only covered the first 2 chapters. My instructor has been teaching Chinese for 35 years and he's had his copy for at least 15 years. He highly recommends this book. He knows more than I do so I'll stick to what he suggests.

A few reviewers below have said that the conversations in this text are too old-fashioned and that no one talks this way in China anymore. I haven't shown this book to any Chinese friends but I can't see how the relative colloquialism of these texts would be a big problem. They don't seem very different from others I've read, and the Second Revised Edition (1976) does discuss Revolutionary changes ('airen' versus 'xiansheng' for husband, etc). It seems to be the equivalent of any English text from a few decades ago - people might not talk quite the same way now, but the vast bulk of vocabulary is the same, and anyway, no one ever faults a foreigner for having too bookish or old-fashioned a manner: on the contrary, we often find it charming. Not to mention that Chinese is spoken differently Beijing, Taiwan, Los Angeles, etc. Strikingly, the illustrations, though much superior to the cartoons in other Chinese learning texts, are very old-fashioned: Americans in Western suits and Chinese in silk longcoats. (Though I did see a man dressed like that in an LA supermarket last week!) If the drawings were updated, I bet the texts would not make half so bad an impression. And the advantages of this work far outweigh the disadvantages. With almost all Chinese language learning texts I've used, I've felt that I had been thrown into a sink-or-swim, suffering-is-good-for-you situation. Brute memorization seems to be the traditional Chinese learning method. In most modern textbooks there is little attempt to explain grammar, and when it is attempted, it is done extremely poorly. Also, there are very few exercises; what exercises there are often stress the wrong things; and the student ends up memorizing lots of vocabulary words and grammar points that he really hasn't seen used in more than one context and so doesn't really understand. The whole presentation seems quite thoughtless and haphazard. Defrancis, by contrast, seems to have taken the writing of this series as a labor of love. He obviously put a huge amount of thought into them. The presentation is well linked together. Each vocabulary word is thoroughly defined and the grammar notes are extensive. And there is lots of practice: each chapter uses the new vocabulary over and over in the "sentence build-ups," "substitution tables," "pattern drills," and many other added exercises suited to the learning task at hand. For example, in Chapters 3 and 4, when numbers are introduced for the first time, along with the usual "sentence build-ups," etc., Defrancis adds several extra exercises: "Number Practice," "Multiplication table," "Numbers and Measures," "A Charge Account," and even instructions for a number-learning game called "Boom!" A short, concrete example of how much better Defrancis explains grammar: "Integrated Chinese," which my school uses for first-year text, defines the particle "a" as a "[particle] used at the end of a sentence to emphasize agreement, exclamation

I'm not an academic, so I have no professional qualifications to evaluate this book. But I enjoy learning languages, and I know what works for me.This is the best learning textbook for Chinese that I've come across. Granted, it's somewhat dated, but the presentation of the grammar is clear, and the drills are first-rate. (important note: buy the tapes that accompany the book; try the language lab at Cornell, or Far Eastern Publications, in Yale. The language lab at Seton Hall University used to sell them as well).There are 24 lessons, and the common theme throughout is the experiences of an American student in Taiwan. Each lesson begins with a dialogue, and is followed by new vocabulary and what DeFrancis calls "sentence build-up"; the new vocabulary is introduced first in small phrases, then in full sentences. Each lesson introduces 4 or 5 grammatical patterns, with illustrative sentences. The lessons also have pronunciation practice, addditional drills, dialogues, puzzles, etc. Again, the tapes are excellent, and indispensable.The book is geared toward spoken Mandarin; all the Chinese is in pinyin romanization. If you're interested in the written language as well, there's his 2-part Beginning Chinese Reader that excellent, as well.If you're serious about learning Chinese, want to know more than a few phrases, and you're willing to invest the time and energy to learn it well, it would be hard to find anything better than this.