feng said:
.... but the New Practical Chinese Reader series looked nice. It's attractive, and so should be pleasant to use.
That's your only criteria--"It looks nice"? That'll generally get you a good English coursebook since they're primarily written, edited and gone over with a fine tooth comb by those with a solid theoretical and practical background in language learning/teaching.
But education in China is not the profession it is in the west--there's no body of ongoing research into what works and what doesn't. Things made for the domestic market here fall apart or break. Progress is a western concoept. Someone with limited teaching experience writes the book, someone proofreads it and it goes to press. That first Chinese course book I used was a 'revised' edition but still had typos
in the Chinese for god's sake. And most of the content was simply pulled straight from primary readers--shows you how much thought went into how the needs of foreigners learning the language may differ from native speakers.
Spoken Chinese, although written as conversations between foreign exchange students about life in China, differs little from that older series. The end-of-lesson glossaries in such books usually provide just a one-word definition with no indication as to the word frequency, synonyms, antonyms, etc. Such books are merely language presentation--graded readers. Without PLECO, I just wouldn't have the patience to look up 10+ characters per page that don't appear in the glossary. Even still, I question the value of looking up all those characters as the text provides virtually no practice with which to use them as does Practical Chinese Reader (am I right?)
Next time I'm in a big city bookshop, I'll look at
Practical Chinese Reader and give you my opinion of it. Although it's a series that's at least 10 yrs old, I'd like to think at least the latest version (what year?) is far better than Spoken Chinese.
