Success With Chinese: A Communicative Approach for Beginners: Reading & Writing (English and Chinese Edition) - Softcover

Swihart, De-An Wu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887274757 ISBN 13: 9780887274756

Publisher: Cheng & Tsui Co, 2005

Synopsis

Educated in China and the U.S., Swihart has taught Chinese to university students in the U.S. for 19 years. She offers a beginning-level text for English speakers who plan to visit or work in China and want to be able to get around independently; a parallel listening/speaking text is also available in the series. The opening chapter introduces Chinese characters and the general rules of character writing. Each of the 17 subsequent chapters introduces 12 to 18 new characters used in everyday life, including numbers, money, foods, tastes and cooking methods, cutting methods and kinds of foods, drinks, reading menus, telephones, hotels, signs and directions, time, calendars, and filling in forms. The text is also suitable for use in regular college courses, immersion programs, intensive summer programs, and language training schools. No subject index. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

De-an Wu Swihart holds degrees from Peking University, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. She has spent the past decade accompanying English speakers to China and preparing them to live and work there. She has taught Chinese to university students in the U.S. for 19 years and currently is Co-Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning in China LLC, Memphis, Tennessee. She has published numerous books and articles in English and Chinese.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How This Book's Design Leads to Success with Chinese

This book was written for people who plan to live or work in China--students, English teachers, and others. It can also be used as a textbook in regular college courses, in immersion programs, in intensive summer programs, and in language training schools.

Success with Chinese is structured in two separate but coordinated parts: Listening & Speaking and Reading & Writing. This is because the phonetic language background of English speakers leads them to expect to be able to look at an unfamiliar work and determine is pronounciation from its spelling. But Chinese, as a character-based, non-phonetic language, does not allow that, except through Pinyin, the Chinese system for phonetically transliterating Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. Thus the task of learning a Chinese character entails learning the graphic character, its meaning, and its Pinyin pronounciation, both spelling and tone. Very often, English speakers learn to speak and understand Chinese faster than they learn to read and write it. Most students need time to learn to connect the pronounciation of Chinese characters with their shapes, and only then can they read.

This use of a coordinated two-part structure allows teachers, as well as individual learners, considerable flexibility in designing the instruction and learning process.

Students can learn Chinese by studying the two parts concurrently, but without having to use the same pace for Listening & Speaking as for Reading & Writing. It is recommended to have students concentrate primarily on speaking and listening at first, while learning reading and writing at a slower pace. This allows students, especially native speakers of English, to have more confidence about learning Chinese, because they will already have learned to say many of the words by the time they are asked to learn the Chinese characters.

For students who wish to learn only spoken Chinese, Listening & Speaking may be studied independently of Reading & Writing. For students who are learning or who have already learned some spoken Chinese, Reading & Writing can be used as an independent course.

In the Chinese dialogues and short passages in this book, Pinyin transliterations are printed directly below each Chinese character, rather than in a separate section away from the characters, as is commonly done in many Chinese textbooks. This design helps English speakers associate the Chinese characters with their sounds. I believe that in this way, an English-speaking student of Chinese will make the connection between characters and sounds more quickly and will later learn to read characters without the help of Pinyin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cheng & Tsui Co
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887274757
• ISBN 13: 9780887274756
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 210