Not quite as user-friendly as the preceding volumes
Advanced Chinese Reader is the fifth and final volume in the Chinese Reader series of textbooks by John DeFrancis. It was originally published in 1966. Though the book utilizes the same effective method of instruction DeFrancis developed in the previous volumes of the series, the Advanced volume is structured a bit differently. While the Beginning and Intermediate levels are divided into two volumes each, the Advanced level is contained in one single volume. Nevertheless, it still presents 400 new Chinese characters, so the same amount of content is packed into a smaller package. This book has 25 lessons, each featuring 16 new characters and hundreds of character compounds (words or phrases). Unlike the previous volumes, there are no review lessons. Each character combination is presented in a sample sentence. Only a few of the more complicated sentences are translated into English. Each lesson also contains from nine to fifteen pages of reading passages, all in paragraph prose, sometimes in the form of personal letters. There are no dialogues in this book. The Chinese characters in this volume are one-half the height of those in the Intermediate volumes, so DeFrancis can cram a lot of material into fewer pages. Some of the individual reading passages can run as long as three pages. These longer pieces are often summaries of or paraphrased excerpts from classic works of Chinese literature and philosophy, such as the novel Dream of the Red Chamber or Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles. As in the previous volumes, the supplemental lessons on modern characters appear at the back of the book, along with all of the usual charts and glossaries.
Because of the increase in the amount of content to be learned, and the lack of review lessons, this volume requires a lot more hard work on the part of the reader to learn and retain the information. It’s not quite as simple as the learning by osmosis that one experiences with the Beginning and Intermediate levels. You must do your own reviewing, including memorization drills, in order to keep all the characters straight, or you will drown beneath the flood of new characters and compounds that inundates you with each chapter. Still, if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably willing to put in the extra effort, and the harder you work the more you’ll learn.
The copy of this book that I received from Amazon appears to be a print-on-demand book, meaning that instead of the publisher printing up thousands of copies on a printing press and then storing them in a warehouse, the book is laser printed after you purchase it. Though it’s not glaringly noticeable, the printing is not of the same level of quality that you get from an offset printing press. The result is that some of the more intricate Chinese characters are difficult to read because the spaces between strokes fill in and the details get muddy. Of course, if you ever try to read a Chinese newspaper, the characters aren’t going to be crystal clear either, so in that sense this book offers you some practice in distinguishing hard-to-read characters. Although I’m not crazy about the quality of the print-on-demand process, it serves the purpose of making it cost effective for the publisher to keep this book in print, thereby insuring that those with a desire and determination to learn the written Chinese language will always have access to this important and effective textbook.
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Excellent, effective instruction
If you're reading this, I’ll assume you’ve already worked your way through DeFrancis’s Beginning Chinese Reader, or are in the process of doing so. If not, see my review for that book. The Intermediate volumes in the series are structured a little bit differently than the Beginning. Instead of ten characters per chapter there are sixteen, and there are a lot more combinations, probably over 100 in each chapter. Because of the increase in volume of information, it’s more difficult to get through than the Beginning volumes. You will find the first few lessons to be rather hard, but eventually you just get used to it. Every sixth lesson is still a review lesson. There are 30 lessons in all, so both volumes of the Intermediate Chinese Reader combined give you a total of 400 characters.
As you learn more characters, the scope of subjects you are able to cover broadens dramatically. Whereas in the Beginning Reader you were reading about England and America, in the Intermediate Reader you are reading about the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and the United Nations General Assembly. In Beginning you learned the word for democracy, here you’re reading paragraphs discussing the differences between liberalism, conservatism, and imperialism.
The last time my Taiwanese in-laws came to the States, they were very impressed when I started writing out paragraphs in traditional Chinese characters. They were shocked when I told them that I was learning on my own without the help of an instructor. What’s more, they even complimented me on my grammar.
The DeFrancis system works. Obviously the more time you put into it the more you will learn and the better you will read and write. I am looking forward to working through the Advanced volume, but I already feel that from the first four volumes I have acquired a foundation of knowledge sufficient to enable me to study other texts and dictionaries and expand my Chinese vocabulary through independent study.
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This is the way to learn Chinese.
This series of textbooks by John DeFrancis is an excellent way to learn Chinese characters. I’ve looked around for other textbooks, but have never found another with such a structured, systematic approach. You learn ten characters in each lesson, and about 40 combinations (words and phrases) composed of those characters. Their usage is illustrated in sample sentences; then you are given dialogues and narratives to read. Every sixth lesson is a review lesson, in which you don’t learn any new characters or combinations. In Volume I and Volume II combined there are 48 lessons, for a total of 400 characters.
One of the great things about this system is that it doesn’t require a lot of memorization. You learn the characters from reading them in actual sentences and paragraphs. When you’re working on chapter 12, for example, the characters you learned in chapter 11 may be difficult to remember, but by the time you get to chapter 16 you’ve read them so many times that they are second nature to you.
As for the actual text, the book is intended for college students majoring in Chinese, so a lot of the stuff you’re reading relates to academia: attending classes, taking exams, teaching, reading and writing books. As you go on in the series and learn more characters, the topics get broader and you start to learn about Chinese culture, geography, politics, and everyday life. It can seem a little counterintuitive at times; before you know the words for colors or food items, you already know the words for 20 different academic disciplines. Since these books were published in the 1960s, some of the narratives are a little outdated. There’s a lot of talk about “I remember before the People’s Republic . . .” and “That old man was an official in the Qing Dynasty . . .” (if the book were written today, that old man would be dead), but you do learn a little about Chinese history and, more importantly, you do learn how to read and write Chinese characters.
This series concentrates mostly on the traditional characters. At the end of Beginning Chinese Reader Volume II there is an extended lesson on simplified (or modern) characters. So you spend about 90% of your time on traditional, and 10% on simplified. Because you spend less time reading the simplifed characters, they require more memorization. Between the two versions about two-thirds of the characters are the same, so you just have to learn the simplified equivalents of the other one-third.
One important thing to note is that in the back of Beginning Reader Volume II, besides the aforementioned lesson on modern characters, there is a glossary/index of all 400 characters and their combinations, plus charts listing the characters by lesson, by radical, and by number of strokes. There’s also some diagrams on stroke order (how to actually draw the characters). If you just buy Volume I you won’t have access to all that helpful material, yet it’s still possible to complete Volume I without it.
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