Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1: Textbook (Traditional Character Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Cannot stress it enough
Review: I am currently studying in China right now, and this book as well as the second-year version formed the foundation of my Chinese. I have been studying Chinese for a little more than two years (almost all of which were in the U.S.) and I am now taking university courses at Tsinghua University. I cannot say enough good things about these books especially compared to other books like the Practical Chinese Reader. The only possible shortcoming (and that is if it is one) is that the grammar and phonetic explanations are sometimes unclear if you do not know the terms (although English is our mother tongue, so . . .), but very clear if you are familiar with English grammar. However, these words are very important if you ever study Chinese in China or use things like the Beijing University Press books which only use the Chinese words for these terms to explain grammar. I noticed that one person criticized the lack of English->Chinese glossary, but the implications and connations of words in Chinese are such that you require a Chinese dictionary to really understand them. My teacher constantly warned us about using an English-Chinese dictionary to find the words we were looking for. The first-year level of integrated Chinese gives you enough words and grammatical structures to survive and thrive in China upon first arrival, as well as flexible and reusable words to enable you to handle many situations.

Rating:
Summary: Cannot stress it enough
Review: I am currently studying in China right now, and this book as well as the second-year version formed the foundation of my Chinese. I have been studying Chinese for a little more than two years (almost all of which were in the U.S.) and I am now taking university courses at Tsinghua University. I cannot say enough good things about these books especially compared to other books like the Practical Chinese Reader. The only possible shortcoming (and that is if it is one) is that the grammar and phonetic explanations are sometimes unclear if you do not know the terms (although English is our mother tongue, so . . .), but very clear if you are familiar with English grammar. However, these words are very important if you ever study Chinese in China or use things like the Beijing University Press books which only use the Chinese words for these terms to explain grammar. I noticed that one person criticized the lack of English->Chinese glossary, but the implications and connations of words in Chinese are such that you require a Chinese dictionary to really understand them. My teacher constantly warned us about using an English-Chinese dictionary to find the words we were looking for. The first-year level of integrated Chinese gives you enough words and grammatical structures to survive and thrive in China upon first arrival, as well as flexible and reusable words to enable you to handle many situations.

Rating:
Summary: Integrated Chinese
Review: I am new to learning the Chinese language, and this was the text book assigned to my first class. Just had my first browse of the book. I think I will enjoy it very much.It starts at a very introductory level. By the end of the book, I will sure be able to read, write and speak Chinese quite well.

What I liked most about this book was its focus on teaching Chinese using the traditional characters, and its balance between reading, writing, speaking and understanding.

Rating:
Summary: A well-structured path to learning Chinese
Review: I have been using Yao's texts for the past two semesters, and have found them to be quite useful. The Level 1 texts are divided into a total of 23 lessons, each containing two dialogues/narratives. The dialogues are generally interesting and are not overloaded with new vocabulary or grammatical points, and new grammar topics are explained fairly clearly with the aid of simple examples. As a guide to learning to read and write in Chinese (Mandarin), the texts (along with the accompanying workbooks) are very good. However, to master speaking and listening comprehension requires exposure and interaction with Chinese speakers.
The only problem I have found is that in the workbook, particularly in later lessons, some characters are used which do not appear in the textbook until later. However, if you know how to use a Chinese dictionary, this isn't really a problem.

Rating:
Summary: No longer the best
Review: I have used Integrated Chinese (IC) for a semester. This fall I changed to the Interactions/Connections series. My reasons and recommendations are given below.

I do not recommend Integrated Chinese (IC). Teachers may like it because all the course materials come in the each set of books: Textbook, Workbook, Character Workbook. The problem: the pedagogy and the Chinese is out-of-date, the dialogues are poorly written, the grammar explanations and exercises are not great and the audio CDs are poorly structured and poorly recorded. I recommend only the Character Workbook from IC

As an example, here is a translation of the first dialogue from IC.
IC-I Dialogue 1
Mr. Wang: Hello!
Miss Li: Hello!
Mr Wang: May I ask your last name?
Miss Li: My last name is Li. What's yours?
Mr Wang: My last name is Wang, Peng Wang. What is your (whole) name?
Miss Li: My name is You Li.

Now, here is a translation of the first dialogue from an alternative course: Interactions/Connections by Yan & (J. L-C. Liu

Interactions I Dialogue 1
[young] Gao: Hey! Li, what day are you going to register on?
[young] Li: I'll register tomorrow. What about you? Today?
Gao: No. I'll register the day after tomorrow. Classes start next Monday.
Li: Isn't next Monday August 31st?
Gao: No. Next Monday is August 30th, not the 31st.
Li: August 30th isn't your birthday, is it?
Gao: No. My birthday is August 23rd, day before yesterday. What day is your birthday?
Li: I'm August, too. August 26th -- tomorrow.
Gao: Happy birthday!

The Interactions/Connections dialogue is meatier and more challenging. More important, it is real people talking conversational Chinese, and it has strong rhythm and comic and dramatic values (mistaken dates). Those contrasts continue throughout the books. The most common comments from a native Chinese speaker when reading
a) Interactions or Connections: "Yes! That's the way we talk."
b) IC: "Well ... we usually don't say it that way."

The IC dialogues are extremely dull, not really colloquial and have very stilted rhythm. Ideally, you want to MEMORIZE the dialogs in a language course, so you burn the speech patterns into your brain. I challenge anyone to do that with the Integrated dialogs.

AUDIO: I haven't heard the Interactions/Connections CDs so I can't comment on whether they are worth the $100 (Indiana University publisher). The IC CDs are pretty bad. They seem to have been made from a cassette master. The have poor miking and uneven volume levels -- when you turn the sound up high enough to hear the man's voice clearly, the distortion on the woman's voice will drive you nuts. The speaking pace is too fast for a beginning level, the pronunciation is not clear and the organization is poor. You can't listen to the tapes without the book in front of you: the vocabulary lists go: "Number 1: 'xiansheng'". Why they wasted precious space giving you a useless item number rather than the english meaning is one of the great mysteries of life.

DIFFICULTY: Interactions/Connections is a college-level course and it challenges you from the start. IC appears to be a high-school or middle-school level book. Not much meat, lots of repetition of vocabulary words from chapter to chapter (filler?).

PEDAGOGY: IC extremely old-fashioned -- circa 1950's. Interactions/Connections very up-to-date and cognitively savvy; especially note presentation of written characters, presentation of cultural material and snappy dialogue.

GRAMMAR: the Interactions/Connections grammar material is much clearer and more up-to-date.

EXERCISES: I stopped using the IC workbook pretty early on because the material was both excruciatingly boring and not useful/challenging enough. Level 1, Part 2 textbook exercises become so cryptic as to be useless. Not hard material, just inadequate editing.

Recommendation for beginners:
1. Start with at least Pimsleur Mandarin I (full course -- buy, borrow or rent) to get exemplary pronunciation and a strong aural base for the language.
2. Progress to Interactions I. Get a tutor to help you get into the first chapters, and give you information about Chinese culture and up-to-the minute expressions. (You will need a tutor or class for any course except Pimsleur audio courses.)
3. If you have a computer and you can afford it, get Wenlin3. It's worth every penny: built-in dictionary, rich character help and lots of readings. Palm and pocket computers also have very nice dictionaries and Chinese tools.

Non-beginners: If you are switching from IC to Interactions/Connections you may have to step back a couple of chapters to catch up. Get the previous book from the library if necessary.

Rating:
Summary: Integrated Chinese is fantastic
Review: I've been studying Chinese for three semesters using the Integrated Chinese series (Level 1, Part 1; Level 1, Part 2; and Level 2), and I'm a BIG fan of these books. I went to Taiwan after learning only 18 chapters' worth of material, and found that the book had -- miraculously -- taught me most of the practical vocabulary I needed to survive. The grammar explanations following each chapter are clear and thorough, and the workbook is an excellent means of reinforcement.

Rating:
Summary: Integrated Chinese is fantastic
Review: This book is quite good. I've studied Japanese for a long time and have gone to great lengths to find a good book for learning it, and it took me about 15 books. I thought that would be the case with Chinese as well, so you can imagine my surprise when the first book I tried actually turned out to be good. This was actually the textbook we used for my class, and although I haven't used many other Chinese textbooks, I would highly recommend this one. There are a number of good points about this book, and a few bad ones:

Pros
1) The vocabulary presented is fairly useful, and the early chapters really do start you off with useful vocabulary. Not like some books where you learn how to say "rainy season" in chapter 1.
2) The accompanying workbook is excellent. The only studying you need to do is the workbook exercises. With languages usually I have to study alot, and do many of the exercises twice, but with this book, I simply do the workbook exercises once and I really feel like I know the material.
3) Although this book romanizes all dialogs, the later books do not. This is a _good_ thing. Believe me, after learning 2,000 Japanese words from a book that puts the phoenetic transcriptions everywhere, you'll be glad to put in the extra effort to simply learn how to read and write the characters early on. I can't stress this enough. Although it may seem hard at first to memorize and learn how to write 30 or 40 characters for each chapter, you will definitely be glad you did. Imagine getting to the point where you know 1,500 words and then deciding hey, I sure wish I knew how to read and write.

Cons
1) The grammar explanations aren't terribly descriptive. It turns out that for much of the grammar they are teaching there's many variants of the same pattern, which they don't teach. So you're stuck if somebody switches around the word order on you. Furthermore, they teach by pattern rather than by grammar. It's great to know "this is the pattern to use when you want to say this", but it's also nice to know that the function of a certain word is to turn an adjective into an adverb, which you won't get from this book.
2) Sometimes the vocabulary can be presented in a weird order. For example, they will teach you the word fast in one chapter, and slow in another chapter. Eat in one chapter, drink in another chapter. Similar words should be grouped. This is of course, what they try to do but it could be done a little better.
3) The glossary in the back is very annoying. There is simply no English->Chinese glossary. Good luck figuring out how to say a certain word in Chinese, because you'll have to scan through _every_ single word in the Chinese->English portion of the glossary until you find it, and you'll probably accidentally skip over it anyway.

Overall though this is a solid book, and I would recommend it. Note that _the_ best book on Chinese is Beginner's Chinese, by Yong Ho. It is simply the best. Buy it. It's insanely cheap, and unbelievably well written.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Place to Start, in an Academic Setting
Review: This is not a phrase book, and not usefull for those wishing to independently learn some Chinese before going on vacation or some tour package. For that you should realy get a phrase book, like Lonely Planet.

This is good for an academic, and thus slower, study of Chinese. I have studied Chinese at the University of Washington, and my first year was taught by Bi Nian Ping, one of the contributors for this book.

The reason I recomend this book is, obviously, it's integration. Typicaly people bring lots of very narrow interests to the table when they decide to learn Chinese. Some just want to learn to speak, some want to learn for buisness, some just want to learn to read classical Chinese. The truth is that you realy can't break off part of the language and ignore the other parts, otherwise you will be hard pressed to make sense of the overall system that is the Chinese language. This book forces the student to, in equal parts, listen, read, write, and speak. That way a full comprehension can be developed, not a fragmented and specialized one.

There are some criticisms of the book: When I was a first year student, the main one was of the books artwork, which is either awfull or hillarious. But that's not realy fair. Other criticisms are that the book is prone to using words it hasn't explained yet. This, however, is an important strategy in language learning. When the student is confronted with actual Chinese speakers, they will hear lots of words that they don't necessarily know, but will need to judge from context what they mean. A lot of students who have only studied in the classroom experience a panic-paralyisis when confronted with and actual Chinese speaker, because if they can't understand every single word they are hearing, they assume they can't understand what the person is saying. Of course, that's not the case, but we need to get in the habit of being ambushed by unfamiliar words, and be comfortable with that. This eleminates a major barrier to open practice of talking, reading, and writting Chinese.

Also, the book is highly instruction-oriented. In other words, it can be dificult to learn from when not partnered with explanation from an instructor. A good solution for the independent student would be to find suplemental books, like the Routledge Comprehensive Chinese Gramar. Or on the other hand, one could just sit in a Chinese restaurant and study untill someone comes along who is eager to help you out. This has certainly never failed me.

Finaly, I recomend the traditional version of this book because I believe that it is far easier to learn traditional first and transition to simplified than it is to learn simplified first and transition to traditional. If you think you don't need to learn both, you are kidding yourself. Almost all the books published in Chinese available in the US and Europe are in traditional characters. Almost all the classic literature was written in traditional, and the traditional characters represent an important aspect of Chinese culture and attitudes. If you think you can ignore this, you will never realy understand Chinese.