Chinese Breakthrough: Learning Chinese through TV and Newspapers

Rating:
Summary: a good textbook for those who speaks Chinese fluently
Review: If you grew up speaking/reading/writing Chinese and are fluent in conversational Chinese, but clueless when it comes to listening to the news, then this textbook is for you. Using traditional and simplified characters on facing pages, the book takes authentic news cast and provide the student with vocabulary and grammatical components. The grammar notes are not detailed, however, because the student should already fluent in Chinese; the words are academic words and those that one often hears on the news. Overall, a good textbook for those of you who are fluent. A separate video tape which contains the actual news broadcast covered in the book is also available (0887271952).

Note: If you are not fluent in Chinese, this textbook is not appropriate for you either as a main text or a supplement. Although having taken 2 years of college Chinese, a student can work through this book (with great effort), non-fluent students (in their third year of college Chinese) are better off using A New Text for a Modern China (0887273122) or China Scene (0887273300).