Learning Chinese Language and Culture is an intermediate level textbook, which was intended to be used throughout the entire school year and designed mainly for students who have completed introductory courses of Chinese as a foreign language. Written in English, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, this book illustrates Chinese language knowledge and introduces Chinese culture in twentytwo lessons, covering a variety of cultural content, including customs and manners, holidays and festivals, poems and idioms, calligraphy and couplets, myths and legends, feng shui and superstitions, and historical relics and sceneries and many others. In every lesson, the authors have strived to maintain a clear topic and a coherent structure. They have also endeavored to keep the contents lively and achieve a fluent writing style while closely controlling the structure and grammar of every lesson.
An innovative text which adopts the tools of cultural studies to provide a fresh approach to the study of Chinese language, culture and society. The book tackles areas such as grammar, language, gender, popular culture, film and the Chinese diaspora and employs the concepts of social semiotics to extend the ideas of language and reading. Covering a range of cultural texts, it will help to break down the boundaries around the ideas and identities of East and West and provide a more relevant analysis of the Chinese and China.
This brand-new manual prepares students for a subject that has just been added to the Advanced Placement program. Separate sections review all parts of the new exam: Listening, Reading, Grammar, Speaking, and Culture. Each section also includes exercises, and the listening and reading sections include practice questions with answer keys and answer explanations. The book reflects the AP exam’s standards, presenting questions in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Two full-length practice exams are presented with answer keys. Enclosed with the manual are three audio compact discs, which present spoken material covering the exam’s Listening and Speaking sections.
Learning Chinese can be frustrating and difficult, partly because it's very different from European languages. Following a teacher, textbook or language course is not enough. They show you the characters, words and grammar you need to become proficient in Chinese, but they don't teach you how to learn them! Regardless of what program you're in (if any), you need to take responsibility for your own learning. If you don't, you will miss many important things that aren't included in the course you're taking. If you study on your own, you need to be even more aware of what you need to do, what you're doing at the moment and the difference between them. Here are some of the questions I have asked and have since been asked many times by students: How do I learn characters efficiently? How do I get the most out of my course or teacher? Which are the best learning tools and resources? How can I become fluent in Mandarin? How can I improve my pronunciation? How do I learn successfully on my own? How can I motivate myself to study more? How can I fit learning Chinese into a busy schedule? The answers I've found to these questions and many others form the core of this book. It took eight years of learning, researching, teaching and writing to figure these things out. Not everybody has the time to do that! I can't go back in time and help myself learn in a better way, but I can help you! This book is meant for normal students and independent language learners alike. While it covers all major areas of learning, you won't learn Chinese just by reading this book. It's like when someone on TV teaches you how to cook: you won't get to eat the delicious dish just by watching the program; you have to do the cooking yourself. That's true for this book as well. When you apply what you learn, it will boost your learning, making every hour you spend count for more, but you still have to do the learning yourself. This is what a few readers have said about the book: "The book had me nodding at a heap of things I'd learnt the hard way, wishing I knew them when I started, as well as highlighting areas that I'm currently missing in my study." - Geoff van der Meer, VP engineering "This publication is like a bible for anyone serious about Chinese proficiency. It's easy for anyone to read and written with scientific precision." - Zachary Danz, foreign teacher, children's theatre artist About me I started learning Chinese when I was 23 (that's more than eight years ago now) and have since studied in many different situations, including serious immersion programs abroad, high-intensity programs in Sweden, online courses, as well as on the side while working or studying other things. I have also successfully used my Chinese in a graduate program for teaching Chinese as a second language, taught entirely in Chinese mostly for native speakers (the Graduate Institute for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan Normal University). All these parts have contributed to my website, Hacking Chinese, where I write regularly about how to learn Mandarin.
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture represents the first English anthology that delves into the fascinating and thought-provoking relationship between the Chinese language and culture, exploring various macro and micro perspectives. Chinese culture boasts a history of ten thousand years, while the Chinese language’s recorded history spans at least three thousand years, dating back to the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions (OBI). This handbook is comprised of 17 chapters from 18 scholars including Victor Mair and William S-Y. Wang. Many chapters approach their respective topics with a comprehensive and historical outlook. Certain extensive subjects are addressed in multiple chapters, complementing one another. These topics include: The languages and peoples of China, and the southern Chinese dialects Mandarin’s evolution into a national language and its related writing reforms Language as a propaganda tool in the Cultural Revolution and in contemporary China Chinese idioms and colloquialisms This book offers an approachable exploration of the subject, appealing to both specialists and enthusiasts of the Chinese language and culture.
Against the background of the Australian government’s strategic plan to promote Asian languages in schools, this book is an innovative autoethnographic inquiry into what actually occurs in the implementation of a Chinese language and culture program in an Australian context. Drawing on eight years of socio-cultural and educational fieldwork in a primary school, Chunyan Zhang examines complex, fluid and heterogeneous daily teaching practices and the ways in which ideas of China are assembled, presented and performed. She asks the following questions: What is China? Where does Taiwan fit into the China depicted in a multicultural, globalised classroom? Can Chinese communism or Chairman Mao be avoided in teaching English-speaking learners? What kind of China is brought in here while what kind of China is being silenced and othered? Through the partial connection between method assemblage and Daoist concepts, Zhang develops a water-like pedagogy in teaching. She uses the knowledge flow model to examine the imbalanced knowledge flow within teacher-student interactions. From finding China as a hybrid assemblage to proposing China as method, Zhang’s investigation makes an important contribution to the sociology of Chinese language education. This book is an essential and rich content resource for primary and secondary teacher education and research, teacher candidates and educators in Chinese as a second language education.
This book provides a research-based account of how to teach and learn Chinese as a foreign language. In addition to the discussion of relevant second/foreign language research, this volume gives detailed information on ways to develop a pedagogical modelthat is uniquely suited to teaching Chinese in five key areas: pronunciation (tones and pinyin), characters and words, sentences (when and why different sentence structures are used), discourse and pragmatic competence (coherence and genre), and cultural competence. Specially written for Chinese language teachers, student teachers and applied linguists, this is the first book written in English that systematically addresses all major aspects involved in teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language. This book covers all the fundamental grammar elements in Chinese, explains their functions in discourse and communication, and explores different strategies for teaching and engaging students in learning the language.
The acquisition of Mandarin Chinese, one of the most important and widely spoken languages in the world today, is the focus of this innovative study. It describes the rise of Chinese as a global language and the many challenges and opportunities associated with learning it. The collaborative, multiple-case study and cross-case analysis is presented from three distinct but complementary theoretical and analytic perspectives: linguistic, sociocultural, and narrative. The book reveals fascinating dimensions of Chinese language learning based on vivid first-person accounts (with autobiographical narratives included in the book) of adults negotiating not only their own and others' language and literacy learning, but also their identities, communities, and trajectories as users of Chinese.
