Beginning Chinese Reader, Part 1

by John DeFrancis

This second edition, like the earlier first edition, introduces some of the main varieties of Chinese as found before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. While continuing to stress the basic importance of the traditional usages, such as the regular characters to be found in all materials published before the adoption of the simplified forms in 1956 and still in use in some areas, the present revision goes further in contrasting variant usages and in providing additional material relevent to the PRC.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Reference

539 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is an incredibly challenging but powerful Chinese tool that will help your reading speed and comprehension. The entire 5-volume series audio recordings are also available on podcast, which will absolutely help your listening.

The upsides of this reader is the repetition. Each lesson will drill into your head how to hear and read different characters and combination words using those characters. The progression in each chapter from sentences, to dialogues to monologues helps build your ability to digest large amounts of information. Just keep in mind that this is meant to improve your reading comprehension specifically. It's not meant as a speaking practice, only reading and listening.

The downsides of the reader is also the repetition. Each chapter hones in on a specific topic and you will be reading about the same topic (atomic energy, publishing a book, etc.) over and over again until you are sick of it. The book also does not have much grammar instruction; it adds in new vocabulary and expects you to understand new grammar as it comes.

The main strength of the series is the emphasis on character combinations rather than simply a laundry list of characters or compounds. You learn the meanings and nuances of each character by itself and how it interacts with others. You also learn dozens of new words with a relatively small amount of characters, so you're not constantly memorizing a billion new words each lesson.
Also, keep in mind that this book was written in the 1960s and uses a strong Beijing dialect. This is not modern-day colloquial Chinese. Furthermore, the readers are all traditional characters, although the ending chapters do contain a small simplified section. This was written before simplified really took off around the world.

That said, this book is like your demanding teacher from high school. It's tough to slog through each chapter but when you finish your reading speed and skill will far surpass those of people who used different books.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would say this is the best way to learn to read Chinese. I would even say that it makes the whole process relatively easy. Instead of memorising a million flashcards for hours a day, you just read the book cover to cover once, a few pages a day, and you will have internalised not only the most common characters and words, but also more and more grammatical etc constructions. Every new character and compound is repeated over and over again in the chapter you learn it, and then will appear again at particular intervals in all subsequent chapters so that it stays in your long-term memory. There aren't many readers in any language that are so comprehensive and so scientifically laid out in terms of repetition.

I'm partway through the advanced volume at the moment and already at the point where I can pick up a novel and, albeit with heavy dictionary usage, read it. Defrancis can't take you *all* the way there, but by the end it's not very difficult learning new words and characters--most characters have an obvious phonetic component or resemble characters you already know except with one extra component or something, so to learning them isn't as hard as learning your first 500 characters would have been. I'm really surprised that so many people still seem to be trying to learn Chinese by *first* memorising like 2000 characters with flashcards. You Don't Have To Do That!!! It's boring and time consuming and you're not actually getting any exposure to real language. With the Defrancis series you are constantly reading new texts, often quite long, which are all 'comprehensible input'--you know all the vocab etc so you don't have to keep stopping to look things up--so it's all seamless, continuous reading.

And a lot of it is very interesting stuff, increasingly so as you get into the intermediate and advanced volumes. There are summaries of parts of history, geography, stuff about the different festivals, plots of famous novels and folktales, newspaper-like reports, as well as random stupid made up stories that can be quite funny.

The fact that it's mostly in traditional characters is a valid criticism, but in practice I didn't find it a real problem, even though I never intended to bother with traditional characters at all. It has additional readings in simplified characters corresponding to each lesson, so just do them and you'll be ok when you encounter simplified texts. Another fair criticism is that it is outdated in vocabulary etc, being from the 1960s/70s. This is true, and obviously it won't help you when talking about computers and the internet etc etc. Other problems I have had concern more the later volumes in the series. In the intermediate volumes, there is a very tiresome and repetitive pattern of readings that are supposed to be dialogues taking place in a classroom, where the teacher asks the students what word X or Y mean. I didn't find these dialogues that useful, and they were very boring. There are also a few typos and mistakes I encountered throughout the intermediate and advanced vols., although they were rare.

But none of these problems overrule the fact that this is still probably the easiest way to go from zero to 'basically literate in Chinese'.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

DeFrancis' Hanzi readers teaches 1200 traditional characters by character frequency, divided into six books.

Despite many of the reading passages being very outdated (1977!), I think DeFrancis is a good approach to increasing literacy. It's strange no one's published more updated readers using the same approach. I guess it takes too much work. (Or are there and I just haven't found them?)

The passages being outdated means you learn some, um, *really* useful vocabulary in the process, like 原子 (yuan2zi3, atom) and 原子能 (yuan2zi3neng2, atomic energy) in one of the early lessons!

[C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never read this, but this is how my father learned Chinese. He highly recommends it for anyone interested in learning to read Chinese.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly one of the greatest language textbooks I've ever used. You will think it is boring until you realize it's hacking your brain.

[Nils Albin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best Chinese readers out there, even if one is familiar with most of the characters and/or words in the book. It improves your literacy and your reading speed like no other textbook can. Basically spaced repetition but in the 1960s. The handwritten fonts are really pleasing, and you can really sense the passion Dr. DeFrancis had for the language. It's a pleasure to take part of the textbook just from that point of view, especially when 95% of all other (modern) textbooks and apps are just made to earn money, and not because of a love for the language.

While some might comment on the content being boring, I find it rather fascinating and it's a fun time-machine back to the 60s. After the first book you'll even be able to impress your Chinese-speaking friends with the words for atomic energy. You'll also get some exposure to pre-1949 vocabulary and dialogues.

And for me, traditional characters only are just a plus.