New Assimil Books: Latin and Chinese

[michal]

As far as I can tell, the vocabulary is all in the lessons. The vocabulary list includes a lesson number next to each item. Looking at the vocabulary list more carefully, I see that some of vocabulary items in the new edition are single characters that do not function as words in their own right, but they are included in the lessons as part of some word: The item 者 in the vocabulary list refers to lesson 72, there you can find the word ai4hao4zhe3 and an explanatory note about the zhe3 suffix. Nothing wrong with that but it means that the vocabulary did not almost double compared to the previous edition, some of the increase in the numbers is due to a more generous approach to including single characters in the vocabulary list at the back. Even so, I would say that the number of words has gone up.

[Snow]

I've read some Amazon reviews on the Kantor version saying it has pinyin/tone errors. Have you noticed any error in the new version's book?

[michal]

I know of two misprints in the book, both of them are wrong tones: L37, E1-5: xiong1mao1 instead of xiong2mao1 (the same word is used on the same page earlier with correct tones) and L63, E-14, mu3dan2 should be mu3dan1 or mu3dan5.

Now if somebody from the publisher is reading this then do make sure the book gets proofread one more time before next printing. For everyone else, who may be reading this to decide which Chinese textbook to get, this quantity of misprints does not really interfere with learning as far as I am concerned.

As for Kantor's book, my copy is a 2008 printing of the single volume French edition. It has been a while since I learned from it; I do not remember the book being infested by misprints in any large quantity.

[Snow]

Thank you, michal!

I'm really interested in purchasing the mp3+book so I want to make sure the quality of the materials is worth the price.

[michal]

You're welcome Snow, glad to be of help, good luck with learning Chinese.

[Arnaud]

Just a quick note about the new Assimil book "L'écriture chinoise" (not so new now, as it was published last year) teaching the chinese mandarin writing system.
The book is not based on the main course "Le chinois", so in lesson 1 you won't learn all the characters of the lesson 1 of the main course, etc.
The book cover says that the book will teach you the most frequent 430 characters and 106 components/keys.
The exercises key and a glossary are at the end of the book.
Of course, a lot of the characters of the main course are also in the "writing course" (most frequent words=most frequent characters) and they are presented in about the same order (you always learn bu, ma, wo, ni, ta, didi, wang, etc at the beginning) but there is no direct link between the 2 books: the main course features 100 lessons and the writing book 80 lessons...

[kulaputra]

I know of two misprints in the book, both of them are wrong tones: L37, E1-5: xiong1mao1 instead of xiong2mao1 (the same word is used on the same page earlier with correct tones) and L63, E-14, mu3dan2 should be mu3dan1 or mu3dan5.

Now if somebody from the publisher is reading this then do make sure the book gets proofread one more time before next printing. For everyone else, who may be reading this to decide which Chinese textbook to get, this quantity of misprints does not really interfere with learning as far as I am concerned.

As for Kantor's book, my copy is a 2008 printing of the single volume French edition. It has been a while since I learned from it; I do not remember the book being infested by misprints in any large quantity.

Are the tone misprints reflected in the oral pronunciation on the tapes? I would think not, and if I'm correct, then anyone who knows Chinese tones whether native or not would easily be able to pick up on that. On the other hand, if the oral pronunciation reflects the same errors, it will require meticulously checking every word against a dictionary or with a literate native speaker to find all the misprints.