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Serious Mandarin materials? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6056 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 1 of 15 16 October 2008 at 4:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I really want to take my Mandarin to the next level after Pimsluer; this includes, writing, reading, spoken, everything.
I thought this would be FSI, but then I noticed that FSI is without hanzi? What are my options now? Piggyback the characters with FSI and learn own my own? Or are there any other complete, serious courses? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6476 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 2 of 15 16 October 2008 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I believe the best and most complete course out there is the "New practical Chinese reader" (not to be confused with the "practical Chinese reader" which was bad). There are 5 volumes, leading up to a very good level, and each volume comes with 1 DVD and 4 CDs. You can even get a workbook and additional workbook CDs for additional practise, but the books themselves already contain quite a lot of exercises. Since this series is produced in China, you could get the whole 5 volumes with all materials for a very low price from an importer e. g. on eBay. Or buy each item separately on Amazon and pay significantly more.
The "New practical Chinese reader" gives you an introduction to character writing, how they are composed, stroke order and the like, enough if you want to learn them by rote, but if you want to use a method that's more brain-friendly, get the book "Learning Chinese characters" published by Tuttle. This is not a complete course, just a companion piece to whatever language course you are using to teach you the characters in a better way. Edited by Sprachprofi on 16 October 2008 at 1:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6056 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 3 of 15 16 October 2008 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the recommendation! I will definitely look at this...
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 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6385 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 15 17 October 2008 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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You can save some money by not buying the DVDs. The videos are available to watch free online (legally as far as I can tell). I don't have a link handy but you should be able to google it.
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6476 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 5 of 15 17 October 2008 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||
Not sure. When I bought the books, the DVDs were included in the back of them, so you wouldn't buy them separately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6900 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 15 17 October 2008 at 10:44am | IP Logged | ||
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On the other hand there is also nothing wrong with learning patterns and vocabulary with one course, such as fsi, and learning the hanzi separately. Fsi is a very complete program that should take you to a solid intermediate level if you struggle through it.
The downside is that fsi can be rather boring and the sound quality is quite poor. These are the main reasons why I tired and gave up on it after struggling with it for a month or two. Fsi is getting on in years as well and you'd be learning slightly old-fashioned language, and miss out on all the trendy stuff. You might also have a look at "David and Helen in China" which is the course I am using at the moment. As I explained in another thread, I bought the first two volumes of New Practical Chinese Reader but never seemed to be able get off the ground with it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aru-aru Triglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 6463 days ago 244 posts - 331 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, Russian | Message 7 of 15 01 November 2008 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||
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NPCR video files are available here
seems to be all legal 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 15 01 November 2008 at 9:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll throw in a few good words for "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles" - furyou_gaijin has posted about it at more length, and used it more seriously.
It's a fantastic set of books that cover 5888 characters, showing traditional and simplified forms, and several compounds using each character (including pronunciation and meaning), along with some historical information about how the characters changed over the last few thousand years, which are a really nice mnemonic aid. It shows the 'bushou' the characters are made of, at the beginning of the book, including pronunciation when the bushou is also a standalone character, and variations for when it's in the east/west/etc side of a more complex character. It's quite a nice read; I'm enjoying it, despite the fact I'm not studying Chinese. On the oral side, there's Chinesepod. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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