Chinese: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Grammars)

Rating:
Summary: Strongly recommended
Review: I strongly recommend this book as a main grammar book in the learning of Chinese.

The characters and vocabulary used seem to reflect those that appear in the Beijing University Press books - the Practical Chinese Reader and the Modern Chinese Beginner's Course.

Examples of grammar are succint in expressing the point. A grammar book like this is especially useful in breaking down verbs, adverbs and prepositions. After getting this book, it helped me past a difficult period where I couldn't understand why some characters and verbs acted liked they did.

Combined with Beijing Uni's Modern Chinese Beginner's Course, a suitable workbook (again, if it is from Beijing University Press it is likely to pull characters from those featured in PCR, et al), an exercise book (the same authors have created a basic and advanced workbook and, although I haven't had a good look, it's likely to be a wise buy), a good dictionary (I recommend Oxford's Pocket Chinese Dictionary) and maybe a secondary course, with tapes/CDs to listen to (Kan Qian's Colloquial Chinese is pretty good), then you have a pretty good collection of Chinese language learning resources to cover most bases. Then you just need a native speaker or two...

Rating:
Summary: A little more..
Review: So far this is the only decent Mandarin grammar book I have encountered. To add to the above review, this book also has the advantage of having both word-for-word-literal and natural translations, so that you can see the exact structure of the sentence, as well as the more natural meaning. The small "dictionary" at the end of the book is not really intended as a dictionary, but rather as a helpful list of all the words used in the examples, along with their corresponding characters. One of the drawbacks of this book is that there are no chinese characters except in the reference at the end. Maybe in a future addition they could add characters? The main difference between this book and the authors other two books (Basic Chinese and Intermediate Chinese) is that the other two are meant more as workbooks, with grammar lessons followed by exercises. Also, the other two books use chinese characters throughout with parallel pinyin. This book would make a good companion to the other two.. they're all somewhat expensive though! But there are really no other options for easy to understand, though thourough, grammars.

Rating:
Summary: I feel cheated!
Review: This book is good, BUT having recently purchased it from Amazon for my impending Chinese studies, I was really annoyed to see that a better grammar book by the same author and publisher - A COMPREHENSIVE Grammar is already available. Note the date of my review here and especially the year. As of this time, Amazon states that the Comprehensive Grammar is "Not yet released". If it is not yet released, then how could I have browed through a copy at a book store in Japan only last Saturday? It is also available through Amazon UK with a long wait. Admittedly, I checked the date of publishing in the Comprehensive Grammar and it said "First Published 2004"! I am in a time-warp or something? What is Routledge playing at? The Comrehensive Grammar is considerably more substantial than this work so I recommend that you resist the temptation to buy and put the money towards the Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar - the book that is "not yet published", requires a 4 to 6 week wait if you order through AmazonUK, but is already sitting on a bookshelf in Maruzen in Nagoya just waiting to be snapped up!