Beyond the Basics: Communicative Chinese for Intermediate - Advanced Learners (C & T Asian Language Series)

Rating:
Summary: Terrible book.
Review: I found pronounciation errors in this book and some times they use the wrong character.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Grammar, But still useful
Review: This book sufferes from the same flaws that most Chinese textbooks do, it does not explain grammar and word usage enough, and when it tries to, it does so incorrectly. The grammar sections are worthless, the sentence pattern sections are okay, except that some of them never give the pinyin for the characters anywhere in the book, and some of the characters in the pattersns have more than one pronunciation. The texts also don't give the pronunciation of proper names, and such as "Deng Xiaoping" and "Zhao Ziyang," whose Chinese rendition the students are unlikely to already know, if indeed they have heard of them at all. The tapes are a useful supplement, but they waste time and space by giving the pronunciation of each vocabulary and supplementary word (students who use this text should already know pronunciation) which could save time and maybe cost.