The Princeton Language Program: Modern Chinese
A Reflection of Reality is an anthology of modern Chinese short stories designed as an advanced-level textbook for students who have completed at least three years of college-level Chinese. While many advanced-level Chinese language textbooks stress only practical communication, this textbook uses stories from well-known Chinese authors not only to enhance students' language proficiency, but also to expose students to the literature, history, and evolution of modern Chinese society.
The twelve stories selected for this textbook are written by such contemporary authors as Yu Hua, Wang Anyi, and Gao Xingjian, and have appeared in various newspapers and magazines in China. Each story is filled with useful sentence structures, vocabulary, and cultural information, and is followed by an extensive vocabulary list, numerous sentence structure examples, grammar exercises, and discussion questions. The textbook also includes a comprehensive pinyin index. A Reflection of Reality will effectively improve students' Chinese language skills and their understanding of today's China.
- Advanced-level Chinese language textbook
- Selected short stories reflect contemporary Chinese society and culture
- Extensive vocabulary lists, sentence structure examples, grammar exercises, and discussion questions
- Comprehensive pinyin index
Four experienced teachers of beginning Chinese have developed this introductory textbook. A pilot edition has been tested widely in classrooms and refined over a period of years. Among its salient features are lessons that are lively, amusing, and relevant to everyday life: concentrated training of ear and tongue in the sound system of Chinese; extensive grammar notes, clearly presented, with attention to mistakes English-speakers are likely to make; a carefully sequenced character workbook embodying a new and effective approach to the learning of Chinese characters; and audiovisual reinforcement via a complete set of audiotapes and two videotapes, one of which offers entertaining dramatizations of the lesson dialogues.
The Chinese Primer is available in two versions, one using the GR system of romanization, which employs different spellings instead of diacritical marks for different tones, the other using Pinyin romanization. The contents of the four volumes are as follows: (1) Blue Book [Lessons]: Introduction; foundation work on pronunciation; lesson dialogues in romanized Chinese and English; appendices; glossary-index. (2) Red Book [Notes and Exercises]: Vocabularies; grammar notes and culture notes keyed to the lessons; exercises. (3) Yellow Book [Character Workbook]: workbook. (4) Green Book [
Pinyin Character Text
]: Texts of the lessons in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters, and a Chinese introduction for teachers.
The first three volumes: Blue Book, Red Book, and Yellow Book are sold as a set (GR Set or Pinyin Set). In addition, the GR Blue Book [Lessons], GR Red Book [Notes and Exercises], and GR Yellow Book [Character Workbook], along with the Pinyin Green Book [Pinyin Character Text] are sold separately. The GR Audio and video materials are available from the Chinese Linguistics Project at Princeton University for use with this text. These supplementary materials are not published by Princeton University Press. For further information and prices, contact the Chinese Linguistics Project, 231 Palmer Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544. (609-258-4269).
