Practical Chinese Reader, IV

Although this book is well into its 17th birthday (the first printing was in 1987), and some of the content are out of date and no longer represent modern China, I have to give this book the credit it deserves for the excellent grammatical explanations it contains. For example, on page 207, the differences in usage between xin4ren4 and xiang1xin4 are explained. If you look up the two words in a Chinese-English dictionary, the definition of the two words are more or less the same, meaning "to trust, to believe, to have faith in, to have confidence in," but does this mean that the two words are completely interchangeable? The answer is no, and on page 207, the 3 differences between the two words are thoroughly explained with sample sentences to further illustrate the explanation. And that is really the strong point of this book, for on the previous page (206), the usage of the word suo3 is also thoroughly explained and illustrated with sample sentences, and the explanations in this book are far more superior to anything contained in the popular textbook Taiwan Today (0887273424); in fact, Taiwan Today's explanation of suo3 is completely useless and not helpful at all in helping the student understand this important structure. Because of this, I would definitively recommend this book for those in the 5-6 semester of college-level Chinese. Students in 4 semester should try volumn 3 (7100000904). Note: the grammatical explanations are written completely in Chinese, but the book does give the English equivalent to the linguistic jargon (noun, verb, resultative complement, etc.) in the back of the book, so the student should be able to understand the text. Most of the book is in Chinese, so the reader should be sure that s/he has a good grasp of foundational Chinese before venturing into this book.

This book is unique among the other chinese learning books I've seen in that the stories are written without pinyin. This forced me to actually read the characters, instead of just using the pinyin as a crutch. The text is also reasonably interesting. The only problem I have with this book is that the vocab lists for a single lesson are really long (more than 70 words per lesson) Otherwise, it's a great book. (P.S. Canada rules!)