Modern Chinese: A Second Course

Chinese, the principle language of eastern Asia, is spoken by more people than any other language in the world. It is one of the five official languages of the United Nations, and in light of recent liberalizing influences on the Mainland, is likely to gain even more importance as an international means of communication.Modern Chinese: A Second Course comprises Lessons 31–72 of a course in modern Mandarin Chinese prepared by the Faculty of Peking University. Dover published the first volume (Lessons 1–30) and its widely recognized superiority (used by Harvard University in preference to more recent editions) has prompted the publication of this second volume.Building on the foundation of grammar provided in Volume One, the present volume extends and deepens the student's knowledge of Chinese grammar, in particular, the structure of basic sentence patterns and complementary particles. Each lesson supplies new vocabulary words and grammatical rules which are then used in illustrative sentences and reading texts. In the original edition, no translations of this material were supplied after Lesson 13. In the present edition, however, all these sentences have been translated by the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. On the other hand, the original edition repeated all the phonetic and grammatical rules — i.e., all the basic text — in Chinese, for the use of teachers in China. In this edition, the Chinese version of this material has been omitted and only the English version retained.The transcription system used in this book is the official pun yin of Mainland China. For those readers acquainted with one or both of the two most important earlier transcription systems, Yale and Wade, a comparative table has been provided. Appendixes also include a review of basic grammar, a complete glossary, tables of combined and simplified characters, and rules for the separate writing of words.