Chinese

From one of the authors of Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar comes Speak and Read Chinese, a simple, fun guide that helps language learners remember essential Chinese characters. Students and teachers rate character pronunciation and tones the two most difficult aspects of learning Chinese. This book addresses this issue by organizing easy pronunciation and tone memorization tricks for the three hundred most basic characters in popular textbook series like Integrated Chinese and New Practical Chinese Reader. Larry Herzberg did his Master's and PhD work in Chinese Language and Literature at Indiana University. He founded Chinese-language programs at two colleges and has been teaching for thirty years.

This new volume of eight short stories, with parallel translations, offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature from the world's most spoken language, without having constantly to refer back to a dictionary. The stories - many of which appear here in English for the first time - are by well-known writers as well as emerging voices. From a story by Li Rui about the honest simplicity of a Shanxi farmer to one by Ma Yuan exposing the seamy underside of contemporary urban society, they are infused with both rural dialect and urban slang and feature a wide range of styles and points of view. Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language.

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban Chinese regularly lost themselves in tales of scandalous affairs, tender romances, and splendid acts of martial gallantry--standard reading fare on Saturdays among city dwellers craving entertainment and escape. Openly disdained by many intellectuals for their frothy content and maudlin appeal, these tales have been largely ignored in histories and anthologies of modern Chinese fiction both in China and the West. Recently, however, increasing attention has been paid to this fiction and its place in the vibrant tradition of Chinese writing during a period of rapid cultural change. The stories selected and translated here invited Chinese readers to enter worlds at once connected to and removed from their familiar surroundings. Today, the stories have become a record of what urban life was actually like, as well as what readers then wished it to be. Like Chinese from decades past indulging in a pleasurable hour or two on a Saturday afternoon, readers of English can now enjoy and learn from these diverse stories, expertly translated. The volume's afterword provides valuable insights into this long-overlooked area of modern Chinese literature.