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HomeShop at BookSurgeFictionRomanceGothic1400+ Chinese Conversational Phrases: Learn Chinese with its most Common Everyday Expressions |
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 Marginally Readable, very inaccurate translations Nov 20, 2009
I think that when the word "English" is spelled Engligh" on the first written page of the book it is no surprise that the author has problems with the English language.
My Comments
Hanyu Pinyin, The chapter on Hanyu Pinyin is confusing. There is a very serious and confusing error in that the author tries to explain carry over's from Wade-Gillis Romanisation when anyone buying a entry level book has probably never heard of it and anyone learning modern Chinese language has absolutely no need to know about it. A student doing a Ph.D. may want to know. There is absolutely nothing about the rules of Hanyu Pinyin in constructing words or sentences. If this was not important I am sure China would take it out of their academic curriculum. Oh wait, I am wrong, there are 9 lines of text to cover this very important topic on page 9.
The author uses a comparison with the alphabetic pronunciation being the same as German, Italian and Spanish. This is absolutely wrong. Of the dozens of books I have on "Chinese" I have never heard tell of this before and certainly 1.5 billion Chinese do not speak this way. German's particularly have trouble with pronunciation of Chinese as their language is very different.
After explaining the importance of tone the author then writes a chapter with unaccented syllable words with no tone markers. There is no accepted word for Pinyin without tone markers. This is an interesting short coming of the book and unprecedented to my knowledge. The chart on page 13 of the 8 classical strokes assigns them all the wrong syllables.
After the chart that shows 8 of the 50+ strokes used to write characters, the author then gives an inadequate 11 line inset paragraph about stroke order. And then he uses an example using the wrong stroke order. He uses the character for rice which is (*Ä, mi3, rice). Sorry, seems this site does not support Chinese characters. And he makes 6 stroke order errors in a character with 6 strokes. This is kind of funny but also rather pathetic.
Readability
Readability is a big problem with this book. I have 20 / 20 vision yet if I sit as I am now with the book at the usual distance and my arms resting on my desk, the English for each of the 1400 sentences is just readable without glasses. But then the much longer explanations in paragraphs are almost impossible to read without glasses as the font size is smaller. With characters with 6 or more strokes it is not possible to define clearly the strokes or stroke order. I just do not understand why the author would make the type so small. If you were on a train, plane, at a bus station or just about anywhere in China, you would not be able to read this book without glasses and a secondary light source.
Translation
Perhaps the fatal error of the book is the terrible translations from Chinese to English. As always, some translations are exact. Yet many translations do not have one correct word in them. If you expect a person to learn 1400 phrases, you must allow them to learn Mandarin grammar. It is not necessary to create fanciful translations that have nothing to do with the Chinese characters. This action of horrid translation cripples a student from learning proper Chinese sentence construction and dooms them to rote memorisation of phrases. It is not possible to functionally learn a language by memorising thousands of idiomatic sentence translations.
11 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 great resource! May 04, 2009
This is a great resource, possibly one of the few of it's kind, for advanced or intermediate learners who want to converse in mandarin about everyday things people actually discuss, and you won't easily find in the classroom.
In most texts, like other languages, you will only learn formal written speech. This is especially true with Chinese, since there is often a big difference in the formal vs day to day speech. If you want to actually hold a real conversation, you may find yourself needing to use and understand common phrases you will never find in your textbook. To this end, these compiled sentences on the most common topics, love, money, feelings and thoughts, greetings, even arguments, is exactly what you need in REAL LIFE outside the textbook topics. Hats off to Dr. Brown. A book of the most used conversational phrases would be useful in every language.
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