26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
tennisace
Newbie
United States
Joined 5606 days ago
39 posts - 43 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Croatian, French
| Message 25 of 26 13 August 2012 at 2:05am | IP Logged |
Maux wrote:
Each chapter contains a wealth of dialogue together with audio recordings, as well as additional reading practice (from chapter 6 onward) and plenty of exercises. Furthermore, there's six books in the series, taking you from the very beginnings to (as I've understood) a high intermediate level, so they'll last you quite a while. On a side note, the main alternative seems to be the Integrated Chinese series. While I have only very limited experience with those books, based on these impressions I think I would prefer NPCR. Besides a cleaner layout (only a minor point), it seems to me to be more thorough (but I could be mistaken on this).
I would suggest, however, to find your introduction to pinyin and the Mandarin pronunciation elsewhere. NPCR isn't always very clear on this, and I think you would benefit of a guide that incorporates a little more phonetics to explain the differences between sounds that to the western ear seem alike. Unfortunately, the only book I know of that is really dedicated to the introduction of pinyin is in Dutch (De klanken van het Mandarijn in 101 oefeningen). But maybe you could also use the first part of the FSI course for this.
Finally, while NPCR includes some explanations of basic stroke order in character writing, you might want to consult a writing dictionary such as the xin hua xie zi zi dian 新华写字字典 to look up any new new characters you encounter in a text. (mdbg is a good online source.) Alternatively, you could first study a book like Zhang Peng Peng's "The most common Chinese radicals" to get a good feel for how characters are structured.
So in summary, a great series of books which will last you a long while, but I would recommend to start with a solid tutorial on pinyin and perhaps a guide to the first 100 or so common Chinese radicals. Feel free to ask any further questions. |
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Thanks for your reply. I'm also planning on using FSI (since it's free!) with NPCR but I will look into the other resources you listed. I don't have a lot of money do spend on books so I'm mostly looking into materials online. But I think I will get the NPCR books since I can get them fairly cheap on Amazon. Thanks again and I'll be following your log as well as asking any questions if I have any.
1 person has voted this message useful
| JayR9
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4692 days ago
155 posts - 162 votes 
Speaks: English*
| Message 26 of 26 13 August 2012 at 10:11am | IP Logged |
I started my learning back In January but stopped from around April until now due to other commitments and problems.
Back then I were using Pimsleur and some online sites like "Chinese with Mike" and "Memrise".
Now with my studies, I'm not sure which program to choose for my main one.
This Is why I like this site and people like you. Lets me see how others have approached this.
1 person has voted this message useful
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