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Mandarin "Through the Looking-Glass" | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5949 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes  Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 5 29 September 2011 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
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Is anyone familiar with "Readings in Sayable Chinese Vol 2" by Yuen Ren Chao (Zhao Yuanren). It's a colloquial Mandarin translation of "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" by Lewis Carroll. I'm eyeing the book and associated audio. It's a bit more costly than I'd like, has cassettes and not CDs, plus there's nothing about whether the book is in traditional or simplified. The book also uses romanization, though not the one that most of us are familiar with. I've heard that the reading is done by the author and his family who have Beijing accents. Edited by Snowflake on 01 October 2011 at 9:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5949 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 5 30 September 2011 at 3:43pm | IP Logged |
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Found one answer...there was an image of the cover in Google books. The title used traditional characters.
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| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5949 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 5 01 October 2011 at 9:36pm | IP Logged |
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Also found this http://www.pinyin.info/readings/alice/humpty_dumpty_chinese. html .
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| Everplayer Diglot Groupie China Joined 5039 days ago 69 posts - 85 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: Japanese, German | Message 4 of 5 02 October 2011 at 1:53pm | IP Logged |
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Although I don't know the book, but I know that the author, Zhao Yuanren, is one of the most revered master of Chinese languages in recent history. Among his many achievements, he could speak more than thirty Chinese dialects, which are, I guess, roughly equivalent to thirty European languages. Probably it is a safe bet to learn the spoken language from a master.
However, as the website and the book are targeting at romanization, there would be NO Chinese characters in the book as the sample chapter shows. You won't be able to learn reading/writing Chinese characters from such a book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5949 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 5 02 October 2011 at 4:13pm | IP Logged |
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I found a brief review on the book at http://www.chinabookbites.com/?p=28. It mentions, "The catch is that he wrote them in his own admirable but complicated romanization system, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which uses a tonal spelling system that many people find weird but which will probably take you less time to learn than going through a few more articles in a Chinese newspaper. (The books also have Chinese characters on facing pages, for those who want them.)" Emphasis is mine. I'm not actively studying characters, though when working with them prefer simplified. Anyhow, I would like the characters so as to be able to refer to them when needed. Your comment about the author helps offset the age of the book and the audio quality which I expect to be scratchy given that the audios for his "Mandarin Primer" are that way. Thank you very much for your comments! Edited by Snowflake on 02 October 2011 at 4:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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