Character Text for Beginning Chinese: Second Edition (Yale Language Series) (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

This is a really good text, but it doesn't use the simplified characters currently used in China. If you want to learn both, this can be a good text to practice the originals. Each lesson is fairly short, but teaches you how to read paragraphs of text pretty quickly.

Helped me get to know my wife

Audio files for the entire John Defrancis text series are available.1. Seton Hall University Global Language CenterThey're currently restoring the site. In the meantime, below option is working:2. The Internet ArchiveSearch Metadata for John DefrancisFilter on Collections to select the audio files for the specific book (e.g. Advanced Chinese Reader)Sort by TitleIt's important to know that the John Defrancis texts heavily emphasize traditional characters, with supplemental materials at the back of each volume to teach simplified characters.Also, note that the green volumes (Beginning Chinese, Intermediate Chinese, and Advanced Chinese) are pinyin with English translations, along with notes on grammar and culture. The blue volumes (Character Text for Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced Chinese) are complete character versions of the same material. The red volumes are readers with a variety of materials (sample sentences, dialogs, narratives and others), along with some translations and a few notes, which align with the vocabulary in the blue and green volumes.Updated January 2023Seton Hall University has made the audio recordings for the John Defrancis texts available via the Podbean app.In the Podbean app, search for:Seton Hall Beginning ChineseSeton Hall Intermediate ChineseSeton Hall Advanced Chinesefor all six texts.They are also available within iTunes and Spotify for any students searching for them there, or prefer to download them using those apps.

Exactly as described. Great price. Thank you very much!

I used this text book in a college Chinese language class. I lent the text to my nephew who never returned it. Excellent resource for beginning Chinese.

Self-learning. Reserve all the time needed to read it carefully and peacefully so as to keep it as a true pleasure.

It's harder and harder now to find good instructional books for traditional Chinese characters these days as so much is geared towards simplified Chinese that's used in China.The thing is, traditional Chinese characters is still the standard in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the overseas Chinese communities in SE Asia, as well as all the signage and literature in Chinese communities in the Americas and Europe.The bonus is that the DeFrancis series also covers simplified Characters as a reference. You'll find that there was a pattern for simplifying the characters that will allow you to be able to read both pretty easily as long as the characters are in context (but it's rare that you'll have to just identify "one" character whether it's a street sign, a phrase in an application form, a menu, etc). Anyhow, there are THREE DeFrancis series that are color coded: blue, green and red. The blue and green go together - the green is the romanized pinyin version, and the blue is the character equivalent (so it's essentially the same book word for word). The red books are "readers" - they cover similar overlapping material using more or less the same sets of characters.There isn't a lot of discussion of grammar, or the four tones, etc in these books alone, so they may not be appropriate for absolute beginners. But they're ideal for those of you (and me) who grew up with Chinese speaking parents and spoke Chinese at home or were forced to go to Chinese school on weekends. For the Chinese-American/Australian/NZ/Canadian/etc folks out there, you'll likely find yourself soaking this up really quickly AND remembering it (or refreshing your memory from childhood Chinese classes) because everything in the Beginner and Intermediate series here covers a lot of what we heard and spoke growing up around our parents and relatives.The DeFrancis approach here in my view is the only way to really learn the characters - through brute force memory via repetition - seeing the characters show up over and over in different contexts through sentence drills, phrases, paragraphs, mini-essays, dialogues, etc throughout the book. There simply are no shortcuts.So that's the good news. The Beginner and Intermediate books (all three series - blue, green and red) will get you to around 1,000 or so characters in a ton of combinations for different words. And you will remember them! That's how effective it is just by reading through them - maybe a chapter a day, or half-chapter a day (30-60 minutes a day) over several months.But here's the bad news. The "Intermediate" level in this series (or frankly a lot of the "Intermediate" level instruction out there for Chinese) isn't really intermediate - if you consider intermediate to be middle school level (6th to 9th grade). 1,000 characters is about what a 6th grader will know. You will know this once you get through these books and know 1,000 characters -- you can recognize about 1/2 to 3/4 of the characters in the wild (social media posts, film/tv subtitles, restaurant menus, some online news, etc) but not quite enough to read through anything without your Google translate on hand to handwrite in the characters you don't know. You basically need about 2,000 characters total, which is what you continue learning through middle school so that by high school you can read newspapers comfortably.So absolutely get the Beginner and Intermediate series. Good news is if you grew up with exposure to spoken Mandarin, then you'll blaze through these series really quickly AND get up to speed on the basic 1,000 or so characters that you'll remember (and can always go back and do a refresher if need be).Just avoid the Advanced series - it covers Chinese history, culture, politics, economics, and linguistic theory - topics that would be covered in high school or college, but based on what you learned in the Beginner/Intermediate series. And as such, it does neither well (covering the topics at hand, or language instruction). It's like teaching you the Japanese occupation of China in WWII by introducing college level vocab to a 6th grader. So yes, you know the Chinese terms for the One Child Policy, but still can't order a simple dish from a menu without pulling out your Google translate to fill in half the characters on the menu you still don't know.

This book is the Chinese Character text for DeFrancis' "Beginning Chinese." There are two theories regarding teaching written Chinese to foreigners. One is that you should treat it as a separate subject in the earlier stages of learning the language. For those who agree with this premise, there is DeFrancis' two volume "Beginning Chinese Reader."The other school believes that students should learn how to write what they learn how to say. For educators who prefer this approach, DeFrancis prepared "Character Text."If you're a teacher, you can come to your own conclusions without further input from me. If you're trying to teach yourself to read and write Chinese, I recommend that you use the readers rather than this book; learning to write Chinese is a task in itself that has little to do with linguistics. You can read my review of the Readers under their proper site, if you're interested in pursuing the matter.