Beginning Chinese Reader (Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent - best to get both volumes
Review: Excellent book to learn how to read Chinese characters. The excellence stems from several features: 1) the emphasis on combinations rather than characters alone - during every lesson you learn about ten characters but many more words (combinations of two or more characters); 2) large size of the characters - very, very useful for the beginner; 3) systematic repetition -- characters from one lesson are used in the following lessons in a systematic way that helps to build and keep your vocabulary. I can't think of any other book available on Amazon that shares these features. If you get the book, I suggest you buy both volumes together because the appendices with stroke order and simplified characters are at the end of the second volume.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, Accomodating Method to Learn the Writing
Review: The DeFrancis series of books on Chinese includes "Beginning Chinese", "Character Text for Beginning Chinese", the two volumes of "Beginning Chinese Reader", and I think an intermediate book as well. While I am not thrilled with "Beginning Chinese" as a text (you can read my review on that book), I think that the readers are admirable. They are designed to teach the writing system on its own, independent of the course material in "Beginning Chinese", and yet there is a certain thematic continuity between the two books, so that they can be used as a supplement to each other. The Yale series used the same process in their earlier set of books, which are something of a classic in the field.

The books start off teaching you ten characters a lesson. They build up from the simpler ones to the more complicated, and also drill you on forming words from the characters you already know (most Chinese "words", if you can use the term, consist of two characters, each with a meaning of its own).

DeFrancis apparently produced the book "Character Text for Beginning Chinese" in addition to the Readers because some educators balk at the system of teaching the writing system independently, preferring to teach their students the words they learn to speak as they go along. I've tried both ways, and I really believe that it's a mistake not to treat the writing system as a separate subject with beginners.

You can probably teach yourself to write from these books without too much trouble. However, learning to write Chinese is an aesthetic experience as well as a linguistic one, and I don't know how authentic your handwriting will be without a teacher. DeFrancis takes it about as far as you can in a book, reviewing the traditional ways that Chinese children are taught to write the component parts in a balanced way. The grammatical demands are minimal, since it's assumed that you're using other material for that part of the learning process. On the whole, a very creditable effort, which is no doubt one reason why it has survived as a standard text for so long.

Rating:
Summary: Not for use by itself.
Review: This book is an excellent means of practicing reading Mandarin chinese in Traditional characters, but has little to no guidance on grammar, pronunciation, or traditional uses. While some self-study types like myself would be tempted to try using just one book at a time, I'd say this would best be used in conjunction with the other books in the series, or one of the software/tape systems for spoken and grammatical chinese.