Mandarin

At the moment my learning revolves around New Practical Chinese Reader (新实用汉语课本).

When I was in Peking a couple of years ago I had a look through all the grammar books on offer... and I decided on this one so I bought all 5 volumes. Cd's as well. When I got back to Australia I discovered that it had just been made the new text for my Chinese class at uni.

The audio is very good, but there is heaps wrong with it. I feel that the vocab they introduce is not very topical, the reading passages and dialogues should have translations somewhere and the general content of the dialogues is a bit lame.

There is a Taiwanese series that comes in about 5 volumes with vcd's of the dialogues acted out that is far better... but the text is all traditional Chinese characters. Still, I'd probably start with that one if I were starting all over again.

Having gone through about 3 volumes (New Practical Chinese Reader) I now find that I'm having too much trouble with understanding spoken Chinese so I'm going through the series again but this time I'm entering everything again into my spaced repetition program and making all the questions as just the audio. Being able to recognise spoken Chinese in sentences and also individual words should be a good test and good practice.

Does the problem with Chinese arise because there are so few sounds available? Well, I'm keeping track of what I've entered; it'll be interesting to see how many words are actually homophones and how many of the actual homophones are immediately recognisable as being such and whether the different meanings actually come to mind.