Taiwan Today: An Intermediate Course

This pricey textbook is designed for the student who is in the fourth semester of college level Chinese. The book contains 12 chapters that present various aspects of Taiwan's culture (recreational activities, religion, the status of women, the environment, and so fourth), but do not expect for a detailed chapter that explains these aspects of Taiwan's culture because the chapters are only one page long, and by no means do they go into the cultural aspects in detail (the supplementary materials will provide further details, but they are often newspaper clippings that are beyond the reading level of the students). Each chapter introduced between 50-60 vocabulary words, but the student will often find that during the sample sentences that illustrate the grammar, many new words are used (but not fully defined in English); thus each chapter more less contain 70-80 new words. What I like about Taiwan Today is that it has both traditional and simplified characters (but the newspaper clippings in the supplementary materials are always in traditional characters), and that it gives fairly good grammatical explanations. However, the thing that is really annoying about the book is that it does not use a system of vocabulary repetition. Thus, the student often find that s/he learns a new word in one chapter and never see that word being used again throughout the whole book. Furthermore, the sample sentences illustrating the grammatical points often do not use the words that the chapter introduces; instead they often employ the use of words that would require the student to consult a dictionary. Overall, the book is not excellent, but it is pretty good in that it give fairly good grammatical explanations and introduces good vocabulary (although the words are not always the most practical; keep in mind that this is not a book that teaches you conversational Chinese).

This book contains much more pertaining and interesting topics than other intermediate books. It contains great reading material--buy also the tapes.

I used this book when studying in Taiwan. It is definately intermediate-level and may be too advanced for beginners. It follows American language teaching methods and has explanatory grammer sentence patterns, lots of drills, and fun practise exercises. It also has a good amount of reading material included. The English explanations are clear and Mainland-style pinyin is used with traditional characters. It is definately *the* book to learn about Taiwan and its everyday life. If you have never been to Taiwan, some of the subjects might seem confusing or odd, but it all makes sense once you are there.

This book presents modern Chinese language material as used in Taiwan. It helped me to have broader and more useful conversations with people which were very beneficial to field studies. The vocabulary is more current than most intermediate Chinese language materials and ensures the student is able to easily participate in most daily conversations with people of almost all education levels in Taiwan.

This book usually is intended for students who have already studied a year of chinese. However it is a bit more advanced than that, but should not pose too much of a problem. The vocabulary and text are much more interesting than texts from first year Chinese courses, and the material is much more relevent to the educated populace of China and Taiwan.