Chinese Textbook Reviews – New Practical Chinese Reader(新实用汉语)
New practical Chinese reader is a boon for beginners and intermediate students who are keen to master Mandarin Chinese, and even helps professional speakers to hone up their learning skills and take note of various characters and to frame sentences. The New practical Chinese reader is ideal for those who are inclined to learn Chinese just to explore the Chinese culture or to cash on business opportunities.
It is formatted with seventy lesions in six volumes, from the beginners levels to the intermediate levels ,for a three year learning course and has been duly compiled under the guidance of the OCFL Syllabus after consulting the HSK Guideline. The focus of New practical Chinese reader is to make the student capable of speaking in Chinese by studying the structure of the language, function and interrelated and relevant details of the Chinese culture packaged with art of listening, reading speaking, & writing skills.
Topics:
The protagonists of this story are a few students from Beijing, China and it revolves around the story about their life.This is the first story of its kind from the relatively new series of Chinese textbooks published in mainland China. The books have been formatted with a healthy blend of culture, conversation, writing & reading. The text is focused on communication, based on everyday situations.
Structure:
The books are structured starting with texts, followed by words and with notes included on the texts, and a detailed grammar section for each chapter, exercises & drills along with an exclusive section for writing characters with the stroke order.
Vocabulary words:
The process of learning and studying the lessons has been simplified as there are very few new words per lesson so that the learners can manage them separately in each lesson. These lessons also include the meanings of various idiomatic phrases which have been incorporated in the same.
Content character:
The book has been simplified and once the second volume starts the pinyins are limited to only new words. It does include tone marks over the characters; however this too is discontinued in the Vol. 3.
The first 2 volumes provide a vivid informative description of characters and at times give intricate details of theComponents and offer a huge scope for practicing. However in the next volume there are the descriptions vanish. However one can indulge in tracing & writing exercises. There are many basic characters which have been aptly explained. However you cannot expect to get all the information for every character.
Grammar:
Grammar has been given its due importance. However the text book fails in giving a perfect and complete grammatical breakdown. Though dialogues are provided, but lack in actual syntactic structure as well as why & how the content is presented in Chinese.
Exercise:
The lessons have a huge scope to indulge in exercises like fill-in phrase, and reading content without the use of pinyin which is focused on the vocabulary used in the dialogue etc.
Culture:
While trying to gain mastery and proficiency in Chinese it is important to pay heed to the Chinese culture as well. New Practical Chinese Reader will help you to clear your doubts about the various nuances of the language.
Recordings:
The CD is not included in the package. The DVDS are well formatted and are worth value for money along with the CDs. All the volumes include the textbook, workbook, teacher’s guide. The best thing is that they are also available in the CD and cassette formats.
You May Also Like
I am seeking a sponsorship to study Chinese language and Asian studies at Makerere university. Please help if you can. I am a graduate of Bachelor of Science Education in sports science-second class upper division of Gulu University in Uganda.