Integrated Chinese =

As a teacher, part of my job is to teach multiple languages. When I started looking for curriculum for myself to learn Chinese, I didn't know where to start. My tutor recommended this book and I have been amazed. It does an excellent job in providing structure, vocabulary, and practice. I can't imagine a better book.

This is not a phrase book, and not usefull for those wishing to independently learn some Chinese before going on vacation or some tour package. For that you should realy get a phrase book, like Lonely Planet.This is good for an academic, and thus slower, study of Chinese. I have studied Chinese at the University of Washington, and my first year was taught by Bi Nian Ping, one of the contributors for this book.The reason I recomend this book is, obviously, it's integration. Typicaly people bring lots of very narrow interests to the table when they decide to learn Chinese. Some just want to learn to speak, some want to learn for buisness, some just want to learn to read classical Chinese. The truth is that you realy can't break off part of the language and ignore the other parts, otherwise you will be hard pressed to make sense of the overall system that is the Chinese language. This book forces the student to, in equal parts, listen, read, write, and speak. That way a full comprehension can be developed, not a fragmented and specialized one.There are some criticisms of the book: When I was a first year student, the main one was of the books artwork, which is either awfull or hillarious. But that's not realy fair. Other criticisms are that the book is prone to using words it hasn't explained yet. This, however, is an important strategy in language learning. When the student is confronted with actual Chinese speakers, they will hear lots of words that they don't necessarily know, but will need to judge from context what they mean. A lot of students who have only studied in the classroom experience a panic-paralyisis when confronted with and actual Chinese speaker, because if they can't understand every single word they are hearing, they assume they can't understand what the person is saying. Of course, that's not the case, but we need to get in the habit of being ambushed by unfamiliar words, and be comfortable with that. This eleminates a major barrier to open practice of talking, reading, and writting Chinese.Also, the book is highly instruction-oriented. In other words, it can be dificult to learn from when not partnered with explanation from an instructor. A good solution for the independent student would be to find suplemental books, like the Routledge Comprehensive Chinese Gramar. Or on the other hand, one could just sit in a Chinese restaurant and study untill someone comes along who is eager to help you out. This has certainly never failed me.Finaly, I recomend the traditional version of this book because I believe that it is far easier to learn traditional first and transition to simplified than it is to learn simplified first and transition to traditional. If you think you don't need to learn both, you are kidding yourself. Almost all the books published in Chinese available in the US and Europe are in traditional characters. Almost all the classic literature was written in traditional, and the traditional characters represent an important

I am currently studying in China right now, and this book as well as the second-year version formed the foundation of my Chinese. I have been studying Chinese for a little more than two years (almost all of which were in the U.S.) and I am now taking university courses at Tsinghua University. I cannot say enough good things about these books especially compared to other books like the Practical Chinese Reader. The only possible shortcoming (and that is if it is one) is that the grammar and phonetic explanations are sometimes unclear if you do not know the terms (although English is our mother tongue, so . . .), but very clear if you are familiar with English grammar. However, these words are very important if you ever study Chinese in China or use things like the Beijing University Press books which only use the Chinese words for these terms to explain grammar. I noticed that one person criticized the lack of English->Chinese glossary, but the implications and connations of words in Chinese are such that you require a Chinese dictionary to really understand them. My teacher constantly warned us about using an English-Chinese dictionary to find the words we were looking for. The first-year level of integrated Chinese gives you enough words and grammatical structures to survive and thrive in China upon first arrival, as well as flexible and reusable words to enable you to handle many situations.

This book is quite good. I've studied Japanese for a long time and have gone to great lengths to find a good book for learning it, and it took me about 15 books. I thought that would be the case with Chinese as well, so you can imagine my surprise when the first book I tried actually turned out to be good. This was actually the textbook we used for my class, and although I haven't used many other Chinese textbooks, I would highly recommend this one. There are a number of good points about this book, and a few bad ones:Pros1) The vocabulary presented is fairly useful, and the early chapters really do start you off with useful vocabulary. Not like some books where you learn how to say "rainy season" in chapter 1. 2) The accompanying workbook is excellent. The only studying you need to do is the workbook exercises. With languages usually I have to study alot, and do many of the exercises twice, but with this book, I simply do the workbook exercises once and I really feel like I know the material.3) Although this book romanizes all dialogs, the later books do not. This is a _good_ thing. Believe me, after learning 2,000 Japanese words from a book that puts the phoenetic transcriptions everywhere, you'll be glad to put in the extra effort to simply learn how to read and write the characters early on. I can't stress this enough. Although it may seem hard at first to memorize and learn how to write 30 or 40 characters for each chapter, you will definitely be glad you did. Imagine getting to the point where you know 1,500 words and then deciding hey, I sure wish I knew how to read and write.Cons1) The grammar explanations aren't terribly descriptive. It turns out that for much of the grammar they are teaching there's many variants of the same pattern, which they don't teach. So you're stuck if somebody switches around the word order on you. Furthermore, they teach by pattern rather than by grammar. It's great to know "this is the pattern to use when you want to say this", but it's also nice to know that the function of a certain word is to turn an adjective into an adverb, which you won't get from this book.2) Sometimes the vocabulary can be presented in a weird order. For example, they will teach you the word fast in one chapter, and slow in another chapter. Eat in one chapter, drink in another chapter. Similar words should be grouped. This is of course, what they try to do but it could be done a little better.3) The glossary in the back is very annoying. There is simply no English->Chinese glossary. Good luck figuring out how to say a certain word in Chinese, because you'll have to scan through _every_ single word in the Chinese->English portion of the glossary until you find it, and you'll probably accidentally skip over it anyway.<p>Overall though this is a solid book, and I would recommend it. Note that _the_ best book on Chinese is Beginner's Chinese, by Yong Ho. It is simply the best. Buy it. It's insanely cheap, and unb