Re: "Kanji in Context" - Chinese equivalent?


Dylan Sung wrote:
"Mike Wright" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:12l10ft8qte6ta3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dylan Sung wrote:

There are a number of Chinese (Mandarin) readers by John Defrancis which
are in my opinion quite good for learning hanzi by exposure. Between 10 -
16 hanzi (depending on which volumes you get) are introduced, with their
pronunciation in pinyin, and meanings in English, then there may be
character compounds created from these characters and characters which
have previously been introduced. They then are used in many, and I stress
many, small text passages for the student see how they are used.

To quote from a recent posting of mine over on SLJ:

(From the Preface to DeFrancis' Advanced Chinese Reader)

"The teaching of Chinese reading has suffered from over-emphasis on
acquisition of characters at the expense of learning many compounds and

doing extensive reading. It is easy enough to look up characters in a
dictionary, but it often happens that what they actually mean in a
given text can be grasped only if the student has achieved a sort of
intuitive feeling for combinations and contexts through extensive
involvement in the total act of reading."


The organization of the whole package is excellent. Things aren't just
thrown together as seems to be the case with some other texts that I've
looked at.

Yes, some work clearly went into them.

You can say that again! The description of the method underlying the
choice of characters & texts in Advanced Chinese Reader reads almost
like the instructions for a huge linguistic sudoku:

"All compounds occur at least twice in the lesson in which they are
introduced -- once in the illustrative sentences, and once again in the
subsequent narratives. Each character occurs at least four times in
the lesson of first occurrence -- once in the illustrative sentences,
and three times in the subsequent text. In addition, each character
occurs twice in the next lesson, once after a gap of one lesson, and
thereafter once every fifth lesson ..."

This series is an extraordinary achievement.

Nigel

--
ScriptMaster language resources (Chinese/Modern & Classical
Greek/IPA/Persian/Russian/Turkish):
http://www.elgin.free-online.co.uk

.

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