Basic Written Chinese Practice Essentials

by Kubler, Cornelius C.; Kubler, Jerling Guo

• ISBN13: 9780804840170
• ISBN10: 0804840172
• Edition: CD
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-03-10
• Publisher: Tuttle Pub

Summary

Anyone learning to read and write Chinese knows that it takes lots of practice! This practical guide includes a broad range of drills and exercises designed to dramatically enhance your proficiency in reading and writing Chinese. It can be used together with any Chinese textbook or teaching program to hone your Chinese reading and writing language skills. Hundreds of exercises in this book help teach beginning learners the basic components of the characters, including radicals and phonetic elements. Special exercises help you distinguish confusing "look-alikes" and teach you how to transcribe Pinyin romanized forms into characters and vice versa, how to add tone marks to the characters, how to identify characters with the same or similar pronunciation, or characters with closely-related meanings, and how to punctuate Chinese sentences. Character practice sheets give stroke-by-stroke instructions for writing each character in both simplified and traditional forms and teach you how to write the 600 basic characters. Writing exercises provided in this book include the following: Rearranging words into meaningful sentences Dialog completion and fill-in-the-blank exercises Answering simple questions based on reading passages Completing tasks based on reading schedules, maps, and road signs Translation of individual English terms and phrases into Chinese Transformation exercises (changing statements into questions, negatives, etc.) Guided composition for simple essays, letters, notes, and filling out forms Correcting passages with mistakes and converting conversations into narratives Changing informal spoken statements into a more formal written style

Author Biography

Cornelius C. Kubler is Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies at Williams College, where he teaches Chinese. He was formerly Chinese Language Training Supervisor and Chair of the Department of Asian and African Languages at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, where he trained American diplomats in Chinese and other languages.

Jerling Guo Kubler is a graduate of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Soochow University, Taipei. Her experience in language education spans more than 35 years. She has taught all levels of Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language from pre-kindergarten to university level at institutions including Williams College, Eisenhower College and Taipei Language Institute.

Table of Contents

The CD contains:

A set of printable flash cards for all characters and words covered in this book.

Audio recordings with dictation practice and related activities recorded by native Chinese speakers.

Hundreds of additional pages of exercises and activities in the form of printable PDF files.

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.