posted by palafx on January 20, 2011 | 6 comments
We should compile a short list of books that Popup Chinese students have found useful.
For example, I am currently working through the very good book "Learning Chinese Characters" from Tuttle, which covers all (old) HSK A vocabulary with a really neat method using little stories and pictures to associate the different parts of compound characters with their meanings.
So how about it? What are you reading?
I have been working with 汉语八百词, which is an excellent guide to the use of tricky vocabulary. Reading it all in Chinese has been very useful to improve my comprehension level as it has lots of user examples of daily life (some a bit too political for my taste). Echo, is this book still available in China? I bought it in the early 1980's. What would be an equivalent book nowadays? :-)
@huyilin
Interesting. I've got a pretty extensive grammar that I'm working through. It's called "A Grammar of Spoken Chinese" by Yuen Ren Chao. It's a bit odd, as since it is fairly old and not a mainland publication (in fact I think it was published in california), it not only uses traditional characters, but also the old Gwoyeu Romatzyh transliteration.
@palafx - YES YES YES. "A Grammar of Spoken Chinese" is just about the best thing out there, as far as I'm concerned. Y. R. Chao is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, the book seems to be out of print, but anybody who's got access to a university library should be able to find a copy, and secondhand copies are often available for sale (about $80 a copy, the last time I checked) on Amazon. There's also a Chinese translation of the book available and in print, for those who are within the warm embrace of the motherland, and I believe 吕叔湘 - another giant in the field - was involved in the translation or editing of that edition.For my money, just about anything by John DeFrancis should be required reading. I was fortunate enough to encounter "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" and "Visible Speech" fairly early on in my study of Chinese, and I am convinced that they saved me a lot of time and effort by steering me away from common misconceptions about the language. It can also be useful, I think, to deal with different romanizations. Y. R. Chao's Gwoyeu Romatzyh may be a bit of a tall order, but George Kennedy's Yale romanization is designed - unlike Pinyin - to get speakers of American English to produce good-enough approximations of Mandarin sounds, so for people having problems with "x" or things like that -- Yale romanizes that sound as "sy-" -- it can be helpful.
@Brendan
Yeah, I actually taught myself GR romanization long before I had any interest in speaking the language, as I'm a bit of a scriptophile. Imho, GR takes better advantage of the phonology of mandarin than pinyin (e.g. by not having separate letters for the palatals -- who needs 'em?).
As far as I'm concerned, the best writing system chinese has ever had was Phags-pa. Good old Kublai Khan knew what was what.
@palafx - While I was back in the States over Christmas, I went to see the "World of Kublai Khan" exhibit at the Met, and was absolutely delighted to see examples of Phags-pa there. I now have on my desk a postcard of a tablet with an inscription in Phags-pa instructing the reader to let the bearer pass in the name of the Khan.
I've tried, in the same spirit, to sign off the podcasts by saying "...and from Khanbaliq, I'm Brendan" -- but David shuts me off every time.