Re: Issues with Chinese

Mike Wright wrote:

A text that's been recommended here before, even though it's a bit
outdated in terms of modern vocabulary and style, is the Yale text,
_Beginning Chinese_, by John DeFrancis. It's well-organized and is
pretty well-designed for self-study (assuming you can find a good way to
get a handle on pronunciation--if you even care about that). There's an
accompanying _Character Text for Beginning Chinese_ that is entirely in
Chinese characters, so you could presumably learn to read everything
that you were learning to speak. You'd have a considerable reading
vocabulary by the time you finished.

And just in case you missed the earlier thread, J DeF also has
Intermediate Chinese & Advanced Chinese (with their associated
Character Texts). There are also correlated Readers for all 3 levels.
If you get all those under your belt you'll have quite a good grasp of
MSC.

More recently, J DeF produced the ABC Chinese Dictionary, which allows
you to look up compounds strictly alphabetically. So if you have a
good ear you should be able to look up any Mandarin compound (~term,
~word) you hear. Of course the ABCD's usefulness is not confined to
this.

Nigel

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

.

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