Comments on: Integrated Chinese (Level 1)

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:51:32 +0000

That’s the text that I used for Mandarin 101 and 102 (and I know they use it for 2nd year as well), and I found it very useful and practical. I took the second book with me when I went to China and again found it useful. I was able to actually use all of the vocab (a good thing for a language text!), and senarios (restaurant, post office, store, etc.)
The only thing I found annoying in the first edition is that sometimes there were the odd traditional character in the middle of a simplified character text.

By: ChinesePod Does Integrated Chinese | Sinosplice: Life in China

ChinesePod Does Integrated Chinese | Sinosplice: Life in China — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:57:04 +0000

[...] Integrated Chinese: Level 1 (by me) [...]

By: Ethan

Ethan — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 05:19:19 +0000

I found the vocabulary very useful and accessible. I found the pronounciation sections less than useless — I was confused by some of their notes about the pinyin vowel combinations. I agree with Roy’s assessment that this book is somewhat less than communicative — their sections on grammar are light and fairly vague, which means you have to have a teacher handy to really learn the points (which you probably need anyhow); however I found the pictures very very entertaining and liked the paperback-ness of the book as it facilitated carrying around and studying from. The book could use a fair amount of editing — words in the character workbook chapters don’t always sync up to the chapters in the textbook, and the questions in the workbook likewise sometimes rely on words that haven’t been introduced yet (one word, “ben3″, isn’t even in the glossary or any of the vocabulary lists, though often used in the workbook). One of the words (I think “du”, it’s the fifth one) in the title is mentioned only once, seemingly by accident, in the textbook proper, which seems to me like bad form. I found it difficult to search the glossary for a word I knew the meaning of but not the pronounciation. If supported by a good teacher, I think this book is OK, but I am left with a feeling of shoddiness by this book’s execution.