Mandarin Scholarship Taiwan » books

Resources for Beginners Test Of Proficiency-Huayu

kang-wei — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:20:13 +0000

Mandarin Scholarship students who have taken the Test Of Proficiency-Huayu (TOP) would know that resources are very limited.

For the Beginner level, introduced in 2007, there is only one Mock Test booklet (2007) and a list of 800 words for beginners (2008, PDF 280kb).

In Taipei, the Mock Test booklet can be purchased at Lucky Bookstore(師大書苑).

A very good friend of mine, has used the beginners word list to write three short paragraphs similar to TOP for Beginners Reading Comprehension Part 3. If you want the answers leave a comment!

Here is the first one:

1. 今天我去___1___，看見一隻的大象，它的鼻子很___2___，眼睛又大又亮。當我摸著它___3___皮膚時，它安靜地看著我，真是可愛的___4___。

１．(A) 動物園 (B) 海邊 (C) 電影院 (D) 博物館

２．(A) 扁 (B) 圓 (C) 短 (D) 長

３．(A) 白色 (B) 黑色 (C) 灰色 (D) 棕色

４．(A) 植物 (B) 寵物 (C) 動物 (D) 玩具

The one above and two others can be downloaded here: TOP_for_Beginners_Part3 [PDF 107kb)

For more information about TOP: Test Of Proficiency-Huayu registration period starts today

Chinese flashcards

kang-wei — Sat, 10 May 2008 08:43:23 +0000

For those of you using Practical Audio Visual Chinese, which is the most commonly used Mandarin text book in Taiwan, you may be interested in the flash cards available at truant.net/flashcards.

They have traditional characters, Zhuyin (BoPoMoFo), Hanyu pinyin and English. There are DIY Print-Cut-Use Flashcards available for download. I downloaded the Practical Audio Visual Chinese Book 1 sample and laminated them. I found the flashcards very useful during my first few months. I didn’t purchase a set because my language center does not use Practical Audio Visual Chinese.

For those of you who use prefer to use a computer or hand held device, truant.net also offers ready to use Virtual Flashcards.

If you’re interested you can read a review of Practical Audio Visual Chinese here.

300 Character Chinese Reader: The Lady in the Painting

kang-wei — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:54:14 +0000

This book is available in Taiwan at www.books.com.tw. If your Chinese is limited it could be tough to get it delivered as Books.com.tw is an online bookstore.

The Lady in Painting is a well-known chinese folktale retold here within the limits of an elementary 300 character vocabulary. It has Yale and Pinyin romanization with Traditional characters. It’s an excellent text for those beginning to learn Chinese. As there really aren’t a huge amount of decent reading resources for beginners I think it’s worth a look. Although it is expensive. The version pictured (2008） has a CD and retails at NT$1350. There is another version (1983) without a CD for NT$673.

Yale Press has some excerpts of the 1983 version available for download:

Read the Foreword in PDF (1 page)
Read the Character Introduction and Preface in PDF (13 pages)
Read an excerpt from the book in PDF (10 pages)

Some of the characters, as my teacher pointed out, are written in a style not really used today but I still found the excerpts great to read. I’m not sure but the characters may have been updated in the 2008 version.

If you have read the 2008 version, please feel free to leave a comment.