Edited by 徐子亮 (Shanghai Haiwen Audio-Video Publishers, 2005)

Review by: John Pasden

Make no mistake — this new Shanghainese textbook’s audience is foreigners. Although there are some Chinese instructions or translations here or there, the overall impression is of devotion to the English-speaking foreigner. This is not a Mandarin textbook, and as a result you will find no pinyin. All pronunciation is given in IPA. The CD comes with the book.

What impressed me about the CD was that the dialogues were between older speakers instead of young people. Living in Shanghai, I feel that I most often hear Shanghainese spoken by middle-aged men and women women (think convenience store clerks, guards, taxi drivers). Consequently, the CD’s dialogues feel particularly familiar and helpful. The drawback was that the British English speaker on the CD talks very slowly, as if he were addressing a non-native speaker.

The textbook devotes an impressive 17 pages to pronunciation, covering all consonants and vowels in multiple positions, presenting a wide variety of Shanghainese syllables, all glossed in IPA. Despite this thoroughness, tones/sandhi are given barely a mention and do not appear later in the vocabulary lists either.

Each lesson is broken down into (1) Daily Sentences, (2) Dialogues, (3) Key Words, (4) Vocabulary Development, and (5) Shanghai Culture. Notably absent is notes on grammar.

Although it is light on grammar and the particulars of Shanghainese’s tones, this 144-page textbook offers foreigners a competent introduction to Shanghainese with little fluff.

[For a more complete listing of materials for studying Shanghainese without extensive reviews, see the Sinosplice Weblog entry: Shanghainese study materials.]

Edited by 陈阿宝 (海南出版社, 2005)

Review by: John Pasden

This brand new Shanghainese textbook sets its goals very high, and it delivers on certain levels. According to the foreword, “learners can use this book to learn either just Mandarin Chinese or Shanghai dialect, or both Mandarin and Shanghai dialect simultaneously.” Indeed, all material is represented in both Mandarin (with pinyin) and Shanghainese (with IPA), with explanations in both English and Japanese. The large black textbook is just shy of 400 pages and is accompanied by an MP3 CD with nearly three hours of recordings (in Mandarin and Shanghainese only).

Vital to the early study of any new language is an accurate, comprehensible guide to pronunciation. Although the book’s usage of IPA and extensive, clear recordings are excellent decisions, a total of only six pages on the sounds of Shanghainese–in three languages–seems insufficient. The text’s coverage of Shanghainese’s tones and sandhi is only enough to be confusing. Tones are not given for new vocabulary words throughout the book.

Each lesson is broken down into a familiar pattern: (1) New Words, (2) Sentence Patterns, (3) Dialogues, (4) Exercises, (5) (Grammar) Notes. Since each section covers both Mandarin and Shanghainese, Shanghainese has to share the spotlight quit a bit.

The lessons aim for practicality, covering the usual range of conversation-oriented topics through a variety of Shanghai-centric dialogues and vocabulary lists.

Although there is nothing especially fresh or flashy about the lessons in this textbook, it is clearly a professional job. Typos are few, and the English is mostly quite natural. The black and white pages and the plain ink drawings will not dazzle you, but the lessons are solid.

The serious student of Shanghainese should take note: while this textbook is not a bad choice, it contains far less Shanghainese content than it would at first appear. Half of the book is devoted to Mandarin, and half the explanation is in Japanese. Similarly, half the recordings on the CD are in Mandarin, so a student interested in only Shanghainese may find it bothersome to have to skip past the Mandarin for every lesson.

[For a more complete listing of materials for studying Shanghainese without extensive reviews, see the Sinosplice Weblog entry: Shanghainese study materials.]

Edited by 叶盼月 (上海交通大学出版社, 1994)

Review by: John Pasden

Xue Shuo Shanghai-hua is one of the best textbooks on Shanghainese out there, from a linguist’s point of view. Recognizing the need to distance Shanghainese pronunciation from Mandarin pronunciation, it has always used IPA as a pronunciation guide, and it is the only textbook on Shanghainese I have seen that gives a complete treatment of Shanghainese’s tones and sandhi. Furthermore, it provides tone information for all vocabulary introduced throughout the book. For the student of tones that just “needs to know,” this book satisfies. IT also comes with three cassette tapes.

I should also mention that the second edition is a huge improvement over the first edition. Although the first edition was every bit as scholarly as the second and one of the first widely available books on Shanghainese for foreigners, atrocious typesetting made the book appear a mere haphazard collection of hand-typed pages. The second edition represents a very necessary revision.

The book’s 204 bilingual (English/Mandarin) pages are broken down into 16 lessons and three appendices (Words with Variant Pronunciaiton in Shanghainese, Comparison of Initials and Vowels in Shanghainese and Mandarin, Word List). The first lesson contains seven pages devoted to pronunciation, relying heavily on linguistic terminology. Nevertheless, this is the only full textbook explanation of tone sandhi that I have seen. The beginnings of lessons 2, 3, and 4 provide additional pronunciation information, making for a total of 15 pages devoted to pronunciation.

The lessons themselves are of the standard format: (1) Vocabulary, (2) Grammar, (3) Dialogue, (4) Exercises, (5) Listening/Speaking, (6) Supplementary Vocabulary. The text is a bit dry and predictable, with the occasional instance of awkward English. Special care seems to have been taken in providing good exercises, however.

Unfortunately, I was not able to listen to the cassette tapes. Judging from the quality of the rest of the book, I would expect a thorough audio treatment of the material, pronunciation in particular.

You may not have a blast with this set of materials, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find something better — particularly in a classroom or tutor situation. The non-linguist or DIY student is likely to get bored with this textbook, however.

[For a more complete listing of materials for studying Shanghainese without extensive reviews, see the Sinosplice weblog entry: Shanghainese study materials]

Edited by 顾月云 (上海译文出版社, 2005)

Review by: John Pasden

According to the preface, “most Chinese textbooks are intended for students studying full-time, not for the working foreigners. My Chinese Classroom has solved that problem by providing a study program specifically designed for working foreigners in China.” Its claim of being especially practical as well as its unique target audience made me curious.

Before even delving into the lessons, I noticed two things about the cover: (1) The title is in English, Japanese, and Chinese. In fact, the entire book is trilingual. (2) The handwritten hanzi that make up the background are traditional characters. Why? I can’t think of a good reason for this. Simplified characters are used throughout the book (except in the Japanese).

Lesson 1 contains simple vocabulary, an introduction to pinyin and the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, and an introduction to tones. The final page is a “brief introduction” to Chinese characters. A grand total of ten pages were used to cover these essential topics, and that’s in three languages. In my mind, the only excusable explanation for such brevity on the important fundamentals of the language would be if the book is intended only to complement instruction by a native Chinese-speaking teacher. However, the preface states, that this text “is [also] intended for those who study Chinese by themselves.” Unfortunately, the overly brief introduction severely limits the usefulness of this series. There is an accompanying CD which provides a clear pronunciation model in both male and female voices, but it’s quite dry (the stereotypical “language lab” recording) and contains no English. If you’re an absolute beginner, forget self-study with this series unless you have a thing for frustration.

The format of the rest of the lessons breaks no new ground: (1) Sentence patterns, (2) Dialogue (characters/pinyin), (3) Vocabulary, (4) Dialogue Translation, (5) Exercises. Notably absent is the familiar “grammar” section. The only thing resembling it is the sentence patterns right before each dialogue. The writers have purposely minimized grammar, preferring instead to take a more functional approach. Sentence patterns and exercises are the only “grammar” you’ll see. I personally prefer a grammar-oriented approach, but I’m sure many expats would welcome this small change from textbook tradition. Still, grammar cannot be mastered solely through inference and intuition, so again, I think a teacher’s guidance would be necessary.

What I did like about the lessons were the character exercises. Although the expected “practice writing the character” sections are there, there is also a section that encourages the student to discover properties and commonalities of Chinese characters on his own. Two examples:

Tell the same components of each pair of characters. 他——她     吗——妈\r\n海——江     认——识

Circle the dependent strokes “zhé” and “gōu” in the following characters. 四    九    门    代    书

Weaknesses aside, I think the book really does do a good job of introducing really useful words and phrases. It’s quite an accomplishment for only ten lessons. There’s very little extranneous vocabulary, except perhaps for the proper nouns section, which includes Japanese names (does the beginner student really need to learn how to say the Japanese name 木村一郎 in Lesson 4?) and Shanghai locations. Of course, the former will be useful to Japanese students, and the latter shouldn’t be a problem either, as this series seems to be available only in Shanghai for the time being.

I also liked the non-Beijing-centric standard Mandrin. 那里 is taught instead of 那儿, etc.

Overall, I think this book is mostly what it claims to be. Although I wouldn’t recommend it for self-study, I think it would work well as the main material for a person who wanted to learn only useful Mandarin as quickly as possible without much grammar. Don’t expect to find this series outside of China, or even — for the time being — outside of Shanghai.

both by 王小宁, 侯子玮 (新世界出版社, 2002)

Review by: Roddy

Published by the 新世界出版社, one is called HSK 听力关键词 (ISBN 7-80005-696-1) and the other HSK 听力惯用词 (7-80005-695-3)

I found these books really good - there’s a lot of colloquial / idiomatic stuff you just don’t get in a lot of the textbooks around. Opening the book at a random page I find 帮倒忙 (to be more trouble than your worth, more hinderance than help) and 弄 as an informal word for do / make / get - which is something you hear constantly, but I’ve never come across it in a textbook.

If you are in China you should be able to get them easily enough - they’re in most bookshops in Beijing that have Chinese for foreigner sections. I first got them in Harbin, so larger provincial cities should have them. There are tapes, though I don’t think they add a great deal - if you have a handy native speaker, I wouldn’t bother.

If you are not in China, I know one forum member has ordered them from this site and been pleased with them.

Originally published on the Chinese Language and Culture Forums. Used with permission.

by 中国社会科学院语言研究所词典编辑室 (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2003)

Review by: Roddy

Basically, they’ve taken the 现代汉语词典, which is a pure Chinese-Chinese dictionary, translated the entries into English, and called it the 现代汉语词典(英汉双语版), or Contemporary Chinese Dictionary Chinese-English edition. So basically, what you have is a Chinese-Chinese dictionary AND a Chinese-English dictionary, with Chinese and English explanations next to each other for each Chinese headword.

The above-mentioned 现代汉语词典 is the work of the Dictionary Department of the Insitute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中国社会科学院语言研究所词典编辑室). I think they license their work to anyone who wants it - the pure Chinese edition I use at work is published by the 商务出版馆 and this one by the 外语教学与研究出版社. I daresay there are other versions floating around.

There are a few additions to the Chinese edition. There are cultural / historical notes in some places, most notably for idioms where the tale behind the 4 characters is given, and historical events like the 八一南昌起义. Usage notes are given for some words, but not many - 把 has one, the note for 进行 points out that you can only use this for ‘formal and serious’ actions and that you can’t 进行 an lunchtime nap (although personally I take my naps very seriously). 八 has a note on pronunciation of the tone.

More interestingly, there is an additional section of 1200 new words and usages at the back of the book - 猎头 for headhunting, 平台 for (computer) platform, etc. It’d be interesting to go through these in detail, and there are many examples of English’s increasing encroachment, both phonetically and through direct translations: 派队，拉力赛 being ‘party’ and ‘rally’, 牛市 and 垃圾股 ‘bull market’ and ‘junk stocks’. It’s unfortunate though, that these are seperate and not integrated in the main dictionary. If you are looking it up in the dictionary then presumably you don’t know it’s new and will have to check both sections, as I did this morning with 回放 (rewind).

The limitation of this dictionary as a Chinese-English dictionary is that it is a translation, and as the preface says ‘not without its errors and oversights’. The English entries and example sentences can be stilted (’I gave him some scolding and he harboured bitter resentment’), wrong (’Peasants have shown greater enthusiasm for production now than since implementation of the policy’ - ’since’ should be ‘before’, according to the Chinese) and sometimes bear a distinct ideological flavor (’The death-defying exploits of the heroes serve to bring out the Chinese people’s noble unyielding character to best advantage’ in the ‘new’ section of all places). I would hesitate before endorsing the preface’s claim that it will “serve as a most useful reference for learners of English.”

However, the problems are not so bad that they would prevent an English-speaking student of Chinese from using the dictionary, and it may even provide some occasional amusement (”Eternal peace to Mr. So-and-So!”). In fairness, the preface makes it clear that the editors are aware of the shortcomings of the English.

For the Chinese learner, though, it should be OK. The Chinese entries are fine. Pinyin is given for the headword, though not the explanation. If you can’t understand the Chinese, there’s the English translation to look at. It might not be perfect, but you’ll be able to understand it.

I think this dictionary may fill a niche, but I’m not sure how big a niche. If you are currently using a Chinese-English dictionary and unsure about starting to use a Chinese-Chinese dictionary, then this, effectively a Chinese-(Chinese+English) dictionary, may make a nice stepping stone. You’d get practice reading the Chinese entries without the frustration of having to get your Chinese-English dictionary out or look up all the characters you don’t understand in the explanation. At the same time, the presence of that oh-so-friendly English may tempt you into ignoring the Chinese an inch above.

I’m not sure it would be of value to those who can use a Chinese dictionary with ease. The notes and extra explanations are useful, but less so than a specialized grammar book, idioms dictionary, etc. I might recommend it as a first / only dictionary, or if you thought the 1000+ ‘new’ entries were worth it, but if you are already using a Chinese dictionary or already have supplementary reference materials like grammar books and so on, I think you could quite happily do without.

One useful thing it does have, which I haven’t noticed before in a dictionary, is a table of Chinese radicals with their names. It doesn’t include all, but if you ever need to know that 写 has a 秃宝盖儿, it might come in handy.

I paid Y99.90 for this here in Beijing (the Chinese-Chinese version comes in at Y55). Binding seems solid, paper appears slightly better than average Chinese-printed dictionary, but you do still find yourself accidentally reading the reverse side of the page at times.

Pros: Chinese and English explanations side by side - never seen that before. Effort to explain cultural / historical background.

Cons: Dubious English.

Originally published on the Chinese Language and Culture Forums. Used with permission.

by 李铭起 (BCLU Press, 1999-2000)

Review by: Roddy

There are nine books in the 汉语听力 course, three each at elementary, intermediate and advanced. I’ve used about five of them, from Elementary 3 onwards.\r\n\r\nI’ve always been really impressed by them because:

1. They’re really well designed - difficult vocab is pre-taught, there’s a mix of longer and shorter listening pieces, questions are pitched very well and there’s a mix of multiple choice / true-false / fill-in-the-blanks and open-ended questions.
2. The listening pieces are infinitely more interesting than some of the ‘Visiting the Factory’ and ‘China is the World’s Most Populous Country’ stuff you get sometimes. Flicking through the books I have handy you’ve got people complaining about pushing on a bus, jokes, daft stories like ‘My Husband’s Ugly as Sin but I Love Him Anyway’ and stuff. There’s a bit of the ‘34% of China’s 463,432 lakes…’ kind of things as well, but not too much.
3. The pieces are very conversational, especially early on - stuff like 真没想到, 没劲 and so on.

Apart from the new vocabulary these books are entirely in characters - you’ll need a certain reading level just to follow the questions - and even the new vocab is given only in characters and pinyin, so you’ll be reaching for your dictionary a lot. There are tapescripts at the back of the books.

I don’t know how available they are abroad. If you type in 汉语听力 in the search box on the BCLU Press page linked above, you’ll find them though. I won’t give ISBN numbers here as there’d have to be nine of them (more with tapes) but you can get them from the BCLU page. Just make sure you’re looking at the right level / book.

Listening is probably one of the stronger aspects of my Chinese, and I think this course had a lot to do with it. I also recommended them to someone who studied Chinese at university for four years and she said they were the best books she’d ever used.

The books are very useful prep for the HSK exam - listening pieces and answers are very similar to what you’ll get in the listening exam (Elementary/Intermediate anyway).

Originally published on the Chinese Language and Culture Forums. Used with permission.

Edited by Cao Shan (New World Press, 2000)

Review by: John Pasden

If you suspected that this book is dry because of the title, you were right on the mark. Dry doesn’t necessarily mean bad, though. I mean, come on, the book is all about grammar. And I do mean all about grammar, almost excessively so. The book is divided into two parts: Morphology (part 1) and Syntax (part 2). Then each part is broken down into chapters such as “Nouns,” “Verbs,” Optative Verbs,” and “Measure Words” in part 1, and “Sentence Elements,” “Aspects of an Action,” and “Ways to Express Emphasis” in part 2. Of course there are many more.

Yes, this book was organized and written by incredibly anal linguists. In this book you will find grammatical explanations such as: “Chinese grammar stipulates that an object must not directly follow an intransitive verb, and the object should go together with a preposition to form a prepositional structure to precede the verb, acting as an adverbial adjunct. i.e., preposition + object + intransitive verb.” Exciting, eh? Fortunately there are pretty easy to follow sample sentences which illustrate the grammar points. The grammar points become surprisingly lucid when you look at the examples. Examples of both correct and incorrect Chinese sentences are given for each grammar point, which is a very useful method.

Furthermore, the book is bilingual (simplified Chinese) throughout. Every chapter heading is given in both Chinese and English, and every grammar point is explained in both Chinese and English. This is great for any linguist nerds who want to learn grammar words like “adverbial adjunct” in Chinese. The one exception to this bilingualism is the sample sentences. They are given in Chinese only, with pinyin underneath. The characters are relatively simple, though, and should not pose a comprehension problem to intermediate students of Chinese.

I recommend this book to any intermediate student of Chinese who doesn’t mind a grammar-centered approach to language. I went through this entire book and discovered quite a few elements of my own Chinese to correct from it. I bought this book in China.

by Tao-chung Yao and Yuehua Liu (Cheng & Tsui Company, 1997)

Review by: Prince Roy

A View From the TrenchesI am a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Colorado and have used the Integrated Chinese textbook series for the past two years. I have taught both first and second year Chinese using this text. Therefore I was quite interested in the review of this series by Mien-hua Chiang in the May 1998 issue. However, after reading this review it was apparent the reviewer had no actual experience of using this text in the classroom. I think such an evaluation, by someone in the trenches so to speak, would be valuable to the authors in revising the next edition, and it is in that spirit I do so here.

The authors state that their intention in writing this book is to provide instructional materials which reflect a communication-oriented approach. This is indeed an admirable goal — as we all know Chinese pedagogy has a tragic dearth of textbooks using a systematic, proficiency-based style. Considering the emphasis given to this methodology in recent years, the lack of such work is all the more surprising. Does the Integrated Chinese series live up to this ambition? I regret that I must answer in the negative. I explain my reasons for this conclusion below, and invite readers to compare this text with the Yookoso series for Japanese by Yasu-hiko Tohsaku, which with a few faults notwithstanding, remains the best text incorporating the communicative approach I have yet used.

Format of Integrated Chinese

Despite the authors’ claims to the contrary, Integrated Chinese remains very much in the old tradition of grammar based, pattern drill, translation, and to a lesser extent, audio-lingual style of texts. The only things that could be considered ‘communicative’ about the text are the chapter topics. This is indeed its strong point. However, the main textbook has nothing communicative in it, save for the dialogues. What invariably follows the dialogues are pages of vocabulary lists, grammar explanations and pattern drills. Nowhere is the student given the opportunity to creatively and practically use the language. The workbook is not much better. The listening sections are OK, but the reading portions employ true and false exercises, which are a poor way to measure reading comprehension. There are almost no speaking activities for pair work. The authors state they wish to equally emphasize all four areas of language learning, but a careful examination of the workbook reveals it to consist of primarily reading, writing and translation activities. The few speaking activities that are included do not build on each other. Rather, the student is cast into a situation and is expected to be able to produce the correct language.

Specific Concerns

1) Pronunciation

This important first step is covered in the ‘Introduction’. As Mien hua Chiang has pointed out, the text is weak in its emphasis on the significance of tones. However, I believe she overlooks an even more vital and ludicrous shortcoming of this book: its introduction of Chinese sounds. Integrated Chinese is a text intended for freshmen students, who on average are eighteen years of age. Yet the explanation of Chinese sounds seems intended more for Noam Chomsky. For example, the introduction describes the Chinese sound zh as an ‘unaspirated voiceless blade-palatal affricate.’ D is a ‘tongue tip alveolar unaspirated plosive’. I could go on. I can assure the authors that their intended audience has absolutely no idea, or interest, in what these terms mean. It creates an immediate barrier to students in their production of Chinese sounds. This section needs an immediate, radical re-write. Do NOT use technical linguistic terms for an audience who are not linguists.

2) Grammar and Vocabulary

Part One of the First Year text contains eleven chapters. At my institution, we cover this book in the first semester. That translates to about a chapter a week. Only by moving so quickly can we complete parts one and two in an academic year. Each lesson has, on average, five to eight grammar points. Vocabulary, not including the supplementary sections, can contain anywhere from 35-70 items. The students struggle with internalizing such large amounts of vocabulary and grammar in five days of class time. My experience has been that they sufficiently grasp the grammar and vocabulary to succeed on the exam, but their retention rate is not optimal. This is where Integrated Chinese should take cues from Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese. The course would be much more effective if the more than twenty chapters of the first year course were condensed into around ten to twelve. Slow down the introduction of new grammar and vocabulary, and spend more time with what is introduced. Create legitimate communicative activities which allow students to consistently use the target language with each other in a guided, expressive manner, gradually increasing in complexity, such as those found in the Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese series.

3) General Appearance of the Text

Mien-hua Chiang briefly mentioned this point in her review, but I think it deserves more attention. A well-designed, attractive text making the most of contemporary graphics is a vital component to a communicative language text, and is also a major factor in the enjoyment of the course by students and the retention of them to the next level. Unfortunately, Integrated Chinese comes up short in this area as well. The most glaring fault is the appalling font for traditional Chinese characters chosen by the authors. Characters with a large number of strokes are in many cases simply illegible. This frustrates the students at home where no teacher is available, and wastes valuable time in in-class activities using the dialogues when they can’t read the characters. This problem is especially prevalent in the second year text. With the many fine fonts currently available for Chinese word processing this is an inexcusable flaw.\r\n\r\nI disagree with Mien-hua Chiang as to the quality of illustrations used in the book, and have yet to meet a student or colleague who likes them. The drawings are little better than stick figures, are generally unattractive and add limited communicative value to the course. The authors and publisher should invest much more time and money in this area, utilizing photographs, especially for the cultural information (which the text handles quite well), as well as authentic photos to accompany the chapter topics. Engaging charts, tables and graphs should accompany communicative activities which involve interviews and pair work among the students. Finally, the text should be hardcover. The Cheng & Tsui Company seems not to have put much stock in the production of Integrated Chinese, and frankly it shows.

4) Lack of Support for the Course by the Authors

In their introduction to the text, the authors state Integrated Chinese has been in development since 1994. They mention plans to include the utilization of the most current interactive technology, videos, a web site (the URL is printed in the text), and a resource/activity base for teachers. I have often visited the website over the past year and a half, and have found nothing which has assisted me in the presentation of Integrated Chinese. There is still no resource center for teaching activities specifically designed for the course, unless we allow for the addition of a few games which have been culled from the earlier Let’s Play Games In Chinese. These games, while sometimes useful and a fun diversion, do not really match the text and at best can be considered no more than supplementary material. I still am not aware of any videotapes accompanying the course. On a positive note, the audiotapes for the course have now become much more affordable. In previous years, the cost was so prohibitive that few students could buy them.

Conclusion

In sum, I think the authors of this text had the good intentions to produce a communicative text, but somewhere along the line lost track of their vision. This is evident in the course’s main strength — the chapter topics, which are genuinely communicative in nature. However, the presentation of the material and format of the course remains a throw-back to a previous era. In our first year course here at Colorado we simply do not use the text other than for general course direction. We do use the workbook and character book for homework assignments, but we design all lessons and activities ourselves. We hardly ever use the main text in class because it is void of communicative content. I would like to hear from other institutions which use Integrated Chinese. I also hope the authors will take a long, hard look at over-hauling this series, which has good potential, into a truly communicative material along the lines of those being produced now in so many other languages.

Review originally published in 1999 at University of Colorado at Boulder as Integrated Chinese: Another View for Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association.

by Zhou Yimin & James J. Wang (China Books & Periodicals, Inc., 1995)

Review by: John Pasden

This book is not nearly as good as Outrageous Chinese, even though the author of Outrageous Chinese co-athored this one. For one thing, it’s not readable. The words in this book are presented in alphabetical order, one after another. Dry and reference-like.

For another thing, the vocabulary just doesn’t seem very useful. I don’t know, maybe a lot of it is useful, but I hear very little of it here. Maybe it’s very Beijing, I’m not sure. Some of my Chinese friends have looked at it and admitted to not knowing a lot of the slang, though. So I would have to say that this book is not as useful as Outrageous Chinese.

One thing the book does have going for it is its two very useful appendices. The first is “Chinese Loan-words.” Did you know that the words “cocaine,” “fascist,” and “polka” very much resemble English in Chinese? Then there’s the second appendix, “Computer and Internet Terms,” which contains terms such as “ascii,” “cyberspace,” “LAN,” and “router.”

Both simplified Chinese and pinyin are provided throughout the book. I have never seen it for sale in China (but that doesn’t mean that it’s not; it’s not anywhere nearly as offensive as Outrageous Chinese). It’s a useful book, but not indispensible like Outrageous Chinese is to the slang junkie.