Intermediate Chinese Reader Part II

by John DeFrancis

A sequel to Beginning Chinese Reader, this text is closely correlated with the author’s Beginning Chinese, Advanced Chinese, and the character versions of these two texts.  It contains 400 new characters, some 2,500 compounds, and about 200,000 characters of running text.  All compounds appear in illustrative sentences, in dialogues, and in narrative or expository form.  Supplementary lessons, summary charts, indexes, and other aids follow the general pattern of those in Beginning Chinese Reader.  This work was supported by a contract with the U.S. Office of Education. Yale Linguistic Series.Mr. DeFrancis, research professor of Chinese at Seton Hall University, is visiting professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii.

748 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Nils Albin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A continuation of "Beginning Chinese Readers", the Intermediate Chinese Reader adds 400 more characters and ~2800 compounds to your vocabulary. The structure is a bit different compared to the "Beginning Chinese Reader", having the example sentences directly underneath the new vocabularies, instead of after the vocabulary list itself.

Nonetheless, a great continuation, even if one is familiar with most characters as I was. As DeFrancis argues, the compounds are what drives reading fluency, and not the knowledge of the characters itself. Large blocks of Chinese text feels less and less daunting to me, and I've gotten quite a bit faster at reading as long as I know the words or can gather the meaning from context. I've seen many words that I haven't encountered before in this reader, and through DeFrancis spaced repetition system, you don't really need to study them at all aside from reading the vocabulary list and the example sentences. Aside from a few look-ups you will intuitively understand the meaning of the words in context as long as you understand the rest. And if you don't, it'll be hammered into your head once you've finished. Others mentioned that the content is boring, but I'd argue it's still quite fun to read to pre-1949 texts and some texts from the early post-1949 period.

It's even better if you can combine this with a modern SRS system like Anki. I don't add all the words, but many.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Started June to July 2010, continued and finished Feb to Mar 2011.) For a set of readers that takes you from zero characters to 800 characters by the end of the two beginner and two intermediate books (1200 if you finish all five books), the DeFrancis readers are great. However, the nature of learning hundreds and hundreds (thousands) of characters is that it's not going to be particularly fun. The motivation is extrinsic -- learn these characters (and vocabulary) and I'll be able to read other stuff. As I've mentioned in my reviews of the previous three books, the content of the DeFrancis readers is not exactly exciting, which is why I don't think I'll be continuing with the advanced reader that comes after this one. You do learn some Chinese history and culture through the reading passages, but being from 1967, it's a bit outdated sometimes (there were quite a few passages dealing with Japanese occupation of China, etc.). At this point, the hanzi-only stats of my anki deck says that I've learned 1145 of the most frequent 3500 characters for traditional, 1078 of 3500 for simplified (not sure why there's a discrepancy; maybe I forgot to add some of the simplified forms to my deck). My current kanji+hanzi progress total = approx 1220 (if counting all forms (trad, simp, jp) = approx 1597).