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Kuo, Startup Business Chinese

  Tags: Business | Mandarin
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
Opensecret
Triglot
Newbie
United States
Joined 4451 days ago

20 posts - 30 votes
Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
Studies: Russian, Mandarin

 
 Message 1 of 1
28 February 2012 at 5:56pm | IP Logged 
I've been slogging away trying to learn Chinese (pǔtōnghuà) on and off for several
years, and have
posted elsewhere about other Chinese materials that I like, but I recently acquired
Jane Kuo's Startup Business Chinese, and I think it's excellent for expanding
vocabulary and reading skill. The book has excellent grammar notes (exploring such
mysteries as placement of the "then" -- jiu -- in "if...then" phrases, which in Chinese
don't always follow the logic English speakers would expect). The book also has very
good notes on culture.

Not surprisingly, the book puts some emphasis on on business vocabulary (terms like
general manager, marketing department, products, etc.), but a lot of the dialogues
(such as discussing where to go out this evening, or talking with the cab driver about
which ring road to take) are broader in scope.   Each chapter begins with a dialogue in
Chinese -- characters at the top of the page, pinyin below, with a pinyin-English
glossary close at hand. Then the author goes into exploration of many of the
vocabulary/usage issues in the dialogue. It's a little similar to the Assimil model,
except that the usage notes come after the dialogue, instead of being integrated as
notes attached to it. Compared to my Assimil Chinese book (Le Chinois sans Peine),
Kuo's
book is much more current.

For some reason, the book doesn't show on Amazon, though two other books in the series
(a Workbook, and a second intermediate volume) do. The only place I could find it was
from the publisher, Cheng & Tsui in Boston, and the bad news was that the price with
shipping came to $84. That almost kept me from buying the book, but I'm glad I did.
(The price does include a disk with a substantial amount of oral content.)

Edited by Opensecret on 29 February 2012 at 6:50pm



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