Oh, China!: Elementary Reader of Modern Chinese for Advanced Beginners

by Ying Wang, Chih-p'ing Chou, Perry Link, et al.

Book Overview

Oh, China is a textbook for the growing number of "advanced beginners" who are studying Mandarin Chinese. These are students who, usually because of their Chinese family backgrounds, can speak and understand elementary Mandarin, but cannot read or write well enough for an intermediate course. Most first-year texts serve advanced beginners poorly by focusing on elementary vocabulary and conversation that the students already know. In contrast, this...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691058784
• ISBN13: 9780691058788
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 8.5" x 11.0"
• Age Range: 6 to 18 years
• Grade Range: Grade 1 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

a really good book

As a Peace Corps Volunteer living in China, I needed a book that would quickly and effectively introduce me to the complex grammatical structures and vocabulary necessary to engage in grown-up conversation. Books widely available here in the motherland were not particularly useful - most "advanced" books here tend to avoid the very issues that are most talked about by young, educated people today.I found "Oh, China" to be a great tool in my personal language acquisition process (a sentence that I can now translate into Chinese...). Most importantly, the book introduces topics of conversation that I often encounter in a method that is all-but-entirely free of bias. I was able to use this book with my Chinese tutor...While it's true that the grammar isn't perfect - sometimes my friends and teachers laugh @ me for sounding like a textbook - for the most part the grammar lessons were right on, especially their explanations in good, clear English.The vocabulary problems stated above are, indeed, quite infuriating.Despite these problems, the book was immensely helpful to me and, overall, a really good book

Oh China!

The title indicates that this is for advanced beginners. I don't consider myself an advanced beginner, but this book was very informative and helpful to me. I really appreciated the wide range of information presented with each lesson, and I learned a lot by just going through the lesson once. Although some of the grammar explanations are a little dry, it is a very helpful reference to have if you are learning Mandarin.