Friday, November 4, 2005

Ultimate Mandarin Chinese

book / ultimate mandarine chinese

Textbook is one of the basic tools for someone to learn a foreign language. When there are typos in a beginning-intermediate level Chinese textbook, usually students would assume they are “correct” and move on.

I wonder how the editors of “Ultimate Mandarin Chinese” would feel after reading this post, especially when the slogan on its cover says “The Most Complete and Up-to-Date Program Available”.

How about recheck your book with a dictionary?

= person
= enter

13 comments:

  1. Also, the book says, "Here are two characters," and then proceeds to list three.

    So, it looks like they can't write OR count.

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  2. 他 is the Chinese character for "he?" Wow, in Japanese that means something totally different, although the pronunciation is pretty much the same.

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  3. Dan,

    The book "Ultimate Mandarin Chinese" does not provide all the meanings for each character and phrases.

    他 has multiple meanings in Chinese as well, including "he", "other", and sometimes "foreign".

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  4. too bad mistake, because people who start studying chinese characters aren't aware how important these little differences between strokes are.

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  5. really gotta say that is tooooo funny... and I gotta also say that as I started to learn zhong wen those 2 characters were confusing as hell for me...

    but this hanzismatter site is funny all around... tai ku le

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  6. thats a big boo boo, the last time i made that was in grade three...

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  7. I had a kanji learning learning book which said that "wicked" or "noisy" was three women (like onna) but I later found out that it was rape or something like that.

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  8. Dan, 他 doesn't mean "he" in Chinese. It has the same meaning as in Japanese. 彼 in classical Japanese is also used in the same way, although it specifically means "he" in modern Japanese -as in "kare."

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  9. That's just plain embarrassing

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  10. That's rather sad, especially since it's a textbook. :/

    anonymous: How is "ta" not "he" in Chinese? I'm a native Chinese speaker and as far as I know, the main two meanings are only "he" and "other/another".

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  11. sui is correct i beileve. The symbol for "Ta" without the female modifyer "nu" attached to it does mean he/she/it/other ect.

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  12. Yikes, this makes me really nervous about my Japanese textbook... now I'll be checking and re-checking each kanji character with a dozen different sources. If you can't trust a textbook, what can you trust? Yikes.

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  13. I bought the book in 2001 and it doesn't have that mistake.

    Even if it did, it's still a good book. The recordings are very useful as well.

    Anyway, it doesn't teach enough characters for that to be a big point of the book. If you're going to criticize it, that should be the criticism: Not enough hanzi. But as for speaking, it's great.

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