During the time I was at university taking Chinese as my second foreign language, I was taught from 3 different book series. None of them was as bad as mentioned above, IMHO.

The first Chinese learning book I encountered was 当代中文-Dangdai Zhongwen (Comtemporary/Modern Chinese). I suppose it has a different version for various languages. I remember the content was a bit dense for a complete beginner but good for revision. It also has an exercise book for character learning which was quite useful for me at the time.

The second book series was “New Practical Chinese Reader”. It has also videos on Youtube with the same dialogues, so it is great for pronunciation and listening. I remember it having some useless exercise prompts, but I think it is good as a Chinese learning book if you just skip some of those parts. I suppose this book is one of the most commonly used one for teaching Chinese.

The last book series was “Great Wall Chinese: Essentials in Communication”. I may be wrong but from what I remember it was completely based on dialogues. A CD containing the audio version of dialogues and word lists was also included.

Books mentioned above may have more components like CDs, additional exercise or/and grammar books that I am not aware of. I just mentioned my experience with the materials I was provided. I hope this helps to give an idea.

Agreed. The real nightmare starts in book three (the blue one) where there’s no Pinyin in example sentences and they include words that are way, way beyond the students. It took us hours extra per chapter just to figure out what the sentences meant.

I think it depends on what you mean. There’s a very large amount of research about how we learn things, including languages, but these are usually isolated to specific areas and often don’t take contextual parameters into account. Also, there isn’t much on a general level trying to answer questions big questions like which general approach works best and so on, probably because such questions are too big to do proper research on.

I’m not sure why it’s considered to be “spoken” since it contains most of the things you’d expect from a normal textbook. It’s probably that there are explanations in Chinese meant for the teacher, but I’m not sure if the actual content is actually more spoken than other common textbooks. However, I haven’t had a close look at enough textbooks to be able to recommend any.

I totally agree with Irina. I cannot understand why its such a widely used series of books. Many students agree. I am just finished Pre Intermediate (after 9 months!) and still learnt very little.

Anyone any recommendations for a better spoken book? Dearly needed!

This article seems like Olle has stolen my thoughts 🙂