Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Level 2 Bundle

Biography

Claudia Ross is Professor Emerita of Chinese at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, USA. Her publications include Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide (2014), co-authored with Jing-heng Sheng Ma; Outline of Chinese Grammar (2004); and Traditional Chinese Tales: A Course in Intermediate Chinese (2001).

Baozhang He is Associate Professor Emeritus of Chinese at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, USA. His publications include Difficult Grammar Knots Unravelled (2015), co-authored with Nansong Huang and Wenzi Hu and Elementary Chinese (2006), co-authored with Pei-Chia Chen.

Pei-Chia Chen is Lecturer and Academic Coordinator of the Chinese program at UC San Diego, USA. Her publications include Elementary Chinese (2006), co-authored with Baozhang He.

Meng Yeh is Teaching Professor in the Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication at Rice University, USA. Her publications include Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese (2010) and Communicating in Chinese: An Interactive Approach to Beginning Chinese, Student Lab Workbook (1999).

Praise for the first edition

"I am deeply impressed by the pedagogical considerations that Prof. Ross and her team put into the project. The approaches to teaching Mandarin Chinese in this series reflected the authors’ rich knowledge of Chinese grammar and their vast experience in teaching the language. The materials developed are pedagogically well conceived and equally well supported by theories of language learning/teaching. A truly innovative and delightful addition to the Chinese teaching field."

Cecilia Chang, Associate Professor of Chinese and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Williams College, USA

"This text offers a refreshing approach to learning Chinese that is lacking in the vast majority of learning materials. Each dialogue is contextualized so learners better understand how the language is used in a variety of communicative situations. Students learn not only what to say, but how to use the right language in a given context based on their role, and when and where the situation occurs. Sentence pyramid exercises provide a stepped approach that allows students to actually rehearse and perform the dialogues.

The material is presented in manageable units with clear and concise explanations that are understandable to students not familiar with linguistics jargon. Valuable information on the social and cultural implications of the language is also provided.

This is one of the few textbooks on the market that delays the introduction of Chinese characters. This insightful approach allows learners to gain a foundation in the spoken language before being inundated with characters to which they have little context in which to place them. Furthermore, these materials use an innovative diglot approach to introduce Chinese characters where newly learned characters are incorporated into pinyin texts. This effectively eases students into reading without overburdening them. By the end of the text, dialogues and other materials are presented almost entirely in Chinese characters. This approach provides excellent spiraling and reinforcement of characters learned."

Matthew Christensen, Brigham Young University, USA