Advanced Chinese Reader

by John DeFrancis, Chia-yee Teng, Chih-sheng Yung

A sequel to Beginning Chinese Reader and Intermediate Chinese Reader, this text, the eleventh in a series produced under the auspices of Seton Hall University, is closely correlated with the author’s Advanced Chinese and Character Text for Advanced Chinese.  It contains 400 new characters, some 3,000 compounds, and about 20,000 characters of running text.  All compounds appear in illustrative sentences and in narrative or expository materials, including adaptations of articles and stories by Chinese authors.  Supplementary lessons present reading material using the simplified characters adopted in mainland China.  A stroke-order chart is provided for characters that students might find difficult to write.  In addition to a pinyin index, there are three summary charts in which the characters are arranged by lesson, by number of strokes, and by radical.  A fourth chart contrasts regular and simplified characters; a fifth chart shows the differences between two typefaces; and a sixth chart presents variant forms of the same character.  This series has been supported by contract with the United States Office of Education.Mr. DeFrancis is professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii.

720 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1968

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I'm finally done!!! Woohoo!! Three levels, spaced across five books, totaling 3000+ pages. I've already said quite a bit about the DeFrancis readers in my reviews of the previous books in the series, so I'll just say a few things about the content of this particular volume. As expected, the font is indeed smaller than that of the two Intermediate books; the size is comparable to that of a regular adult novel (in Chinese, of course). There are 25 lessons and the format of each lesson is the same as the Intermediate books. One difference is there are no review lessons, which is why there are only 25 lessons. The main topics of the readings are pretty much agriculture, politics, religion, history, military exercises, traditional family, etc, and the characters learned and vocabulary from character compounds reflect this. At the time DeFrancis wrote the readers, China was an agricultural-based society, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution (depending on who you talk to), and still had strenuous relations with Japan (I think). The readings actually give an interesting look into that era, but after a while they become somewhat repetitive. I was on a high from my "oh wow, I really have massively improved" discovery when I started this reader, so momentum did wonders at the start. But after a few hundred pages, it took me a while to actually finish it.

The 1200 characters in the series were probably the most frequent characters during that time period, but times have certainly changed. The particular 400 characters introduced in this last volume were hit or miss with me. But, the market seems to not have caught up yet with producing good readers, so I'm grateful for what DeFrancis put together. The market should catch up soon though, considering the seemingly increasing number of people who want to learn Chinese.

At this point, I think I may concentrate on simply learning the rest of the joyo kanji (i.e. ignore Chinese O_o). Or, maybe I'll just watch Chinese dramas and see how much of the subtitles I can actually read ^_~ In any case, onward.