Fundamental Written Chinese - Softcover

Yao, Nora; Lee, Dr. Margaret; Sanders, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0824831578 ISBN 13: 9780824831578

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 2009

Synopsis

Fundamental Written Chinese teaches both mastery of individual characters and reading comprehension. It introduces characters gradually, moving from simple independent characters to more complex compound ones. How characters are organized and constructed is taught through the liberal use of charts that display the structural and organizational regularities of each character, that is, its radical, phonetic component, shared graphic components, stroke order, and principles of proportion. This knowledge is then reinforced by exercises at the end of each chapter that require students to draw on the compositional information presented in the charts.

Reading skills are taught through written passages that are accompanied by questions and exercises. Chapters begin with a reading passage and end with one or two shorter supplementary passages. Because words in Chinese are often composed of two different characters and because the optimum method for introducing new characters requires limiting the number of new radicals and structurally unrelated characters that can appear in any one character, many of the written texts in Fundamental Written Chinese make limited use of a Hanyu Pinyin-plus-character system of writing. This makes it possible for the text to remain faithful to a very controlled approach to character learning while allowing students to read passages that are within the scope of their abilities in spoken Chinese.

The authors of Fundamental Written Chinese and its accompanying text, Fundamental Spoken Chinese, treat written and spoken language as two different but related systems that are most effectively learned by delinking the sequence in which the particulars of each system is taught. Such an approach insures that reading and writing skills are firmly grounded in the spoken vocabulary and grammar previously learned. Both volumes are designed to provide students with a systematic, knowledge-based approach to speaking, listening, reading, and writing Chinese.

Accompanying MP3 audio files are available for download:
http://www.hawaii.edu/uhpress/mp3/fwc/

About this title

About the Authors

Nora Yao is head tutor in the School of Asian Studies and director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Auckland.

Margaret Lee taught Chinese at the tertiary level for more than thirty years and was a senior tutor at the University of Auckland.

Robert Sanders was a professor of Chinese language and Chinese linguistics for thirty-five years at universities in the United States, New Zealand, and Japan.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0824831578
• ISBN 13: 9780824831578
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384