Chinese Proficiency Test is the standardized exam roughly equivalent to a TOEFL for Mandarin. It covers academic, professional, and daily life Chinese skills, making it appropriate for anyone who wants to obtain official credentials for their Chinese ability or just track their learning. As with any test, practice makes perfect. Consistent exposure and experience with Chinese grammar structures and instances of how vocabulary words are used properly are necessary with the HSK. The HSK is a great opportunity to be rewarded for your Chinese studies, and this HSK Vocabulary flashcards aim to help you succeed with your HSK Test exam.
At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Simplified Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the simplified Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each character’s component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.
Hawaii is without parallel as a crossroads where languages of East and West have met and interacted. The varieties of English (including neo-pidgin) heard in the Islands today attest to this linguistic and cultural encounter. "Da kine talk" is the Island term for the most popular of the colorful dialectal forms--speech that captures the flavor of Hawaii's multiracial community and reflects the successes (and failures) of immigrants from both East and West in learning to communicate in English.
At 21 years old, Andrew Pham already spoke French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, in addition to his native Vietnamese. He currently speaks nine languages-but the difference is that, now, it only takes him about 1 month to learn each new language. In this book, he tells us not only how he learned, but also what he learned, when and why.
This user-friendly book is aimed at helping students of Mandarin Chinese learn and remember Chinese characters. At last--there is a truly effective and enjoyable way to learn Chinese characters! This book helps students to learn and remember both the meanings and the pronunciations of over 800 characters. This otherwise daunting task is made easier by the use of techniques based on the psychology of learning and memory. key principles include the use of visual imagery, the visualization of short "stories," and the systematic building up of more complicated characters from basic building blocks. Although Learning Chinese Characters is primarily a book for serious learners of Mandarin Chinese, it can be used by anyone with interest in Chinese characters, without any prior knowledge of Chinese. It can be used alongside (or after, or even before) a course in the Chinese language. All characters are simplified (as in mainland China), but traditional characters are also given, when available. Key features: Specially designed pictures and stories are used in a structured way to make the learning process more enjoyable and effective, reducing the need for rote learning to the absolute minimum. The emphasis throughout is on learning and remembering the meanings and pronunciations of the characters. Tips are also included on learning techniques and how to avoid common problems. Characters are introduced in a logical sequence, which also gives priority to learning the most common characters first. Modern, simplified characters are used, with pronunciations given in pinyin. Key information is given for each character, including radical, stroke-count, traditional form, compounds, and guidance on writing the character. This is a practical guide with a clear, concise and appealing layout, and it is well-indexed with easy lookup methods. The 800 Chinese characters and 1,033 compounds specified for the original HSK Level A proficiency test are covered.
This vocabulary guide contains all 5000 HSK vocabularies grouped by level starting from HSK 1 and finishing with HSK 6. The vocabularies are based on the changes from 2012 and all come with Pinyin and English translation. If you are just starting out preparing for an HSK test, this book is ideal to slowly and step by step build the vocabulary you need to successfully pass whatever level it is you are aiming for. Shortly before the test, the book can again be very helpful in acting as a checklist to see which words haven’t been learned yet or need to be studied again. As common with most vocabulary books, it’s possible to study from Chinese to English as well as English to Chinese. Chinese to English provides you with the opportunity to make quick progress in areas like listening and reading. English to Chinese on the other hand allows you to practice your writing and also has positive effects on your speaking skills. To successfully pass any of the 6 HSK levels there are further topics for you to consider like grammar or listening which are not covered in this book. This book concentrates on helping you to build the foundation that allows you to then accelerate further learning in courses, with mock exams or whatever other form of studying works best for you. Good luck!
"DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it. ... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before. This is a book for everyone." --Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York "Professor De Francis has produced a work of great effectiveness that should appeal to a wide-ranging audience. It is at once instructive and entertaining. While being delighted by the flair of his novel approach, the reader will also be led to ponder on some of the most fundamental problems concerning the relations between written languages and spoken languages. Specifically, he will be served a variety of information on the languages of East Asia, not as dry pedantic facts, but as appealing tidbits that whet the intellectual appetite. The expert will find much to reflect on in this book, for Professor DeFrancis takes nothing for granted." --William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley
The Huanying, Volume 2 Part 1 student workbook accompanies the Volume 2 textbook in the first semester and contains a variety of engaging activities that integrate listening, speaking, rea
