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The books I have been using to study Chinese

My experience with the GoChinese books 

I have been studying Chinese for 2 years and a half, an up to this moment I have been using the same books, which are: The GoChinese series. I have completed all the beginner books, and I'm currently about to finish the first intermediate book. 

So, full disclosure, I don't self-study with these books. I take Chinese classes and these are the books that are used in my language school; in my case they have been a great resource to learn Chinese. Also, it's important to mention that there are two versions: one is in simplified characters and the other is in traditional characters. In theory, they are supposed to have the same content and only the writing system changes. The version I have been using is in traditional characters, so this review will be based on those. 

The beginner series

I have finished the beginner series, both the textbooks and workbooks; the beginner series is from the Go100 to the Go400. Each book has 10 lessons and each lesson is about a different topic, per lesson you'll learn new vocabulary and three to four grammar structures depending on the level, also in the beginners books each lesson has 4 short reading, and usually they have 2 or 3 simple questions, and at the end of each lesson there are two more readings (one-page each), they also introduce new vocabulary in those readings. 

The intermediate books

I'm about to finish the first intermediate book (Go500) but the structure in all of this series is the same, just like the beginner series, these books also have 10 lessons, but the format is quite different; the vocabulary is much more and in a way I think it's a bit more helpful for daily life; also in this series you go more in depth into some topic that were previously seen in the beginner series, for example: in the beginner series there's a lesson about school clubs and subjects, and in the intermediate series there's also a lesson about school, but the vocabulary is much more specific, and  it introduces words like: :做實驗 (to make an experiment)  小組討論 (to have a group discussion) 校園(campus) 貼 (to paste) and much more. 

Another thing is that in these books instead of short readings they have one large story (around 2 pages) and apart from that at the end it also has another reading and a listening exercise. In the intermediate series, you learn 3 grammar structures per lesson, but the structures are a lot more complex than in the beginner series. In the grammar structures, you'll see a lot of modal particles and some rhetorical questions. 

My opinion on these books

I think the structure and the topics they covered are quite useful; also the stories are easy to understand, they have been a great resource, and they are the basis of my Chinese language skills. Something that is great about these books is that they don't have a lot of “text book phrases” there are only a few times when my teacher has said that a sentence was weird or simply not used by natives. 

I also really like the way the books are distributed because since the beginning of my Chinese language path I constantly felt like I was improving, because the books gave me the right amount of grammar and vocabulary, so I didn't feel stuck like it had happened to me with other languages in which I had too much vocabulary but little to no grammar, so I was not able to create sentences. 

How I use this books

As I mentioned earlier, I go to a language school, so I follow that structure. Per module apart from what we see in the books, my teacher also introduces us to more vocabulary, structures, etc. The way we use them might also be one of the reasons my skills have really improved, for each series we had a different approach which I'm going to share with you: 

In the beginner series we practically used the books as they are: my teacher added some extra content, but it was not a lot, and we used to complete three lessons per two months, and at the end of each lesson we used to complete the same lesson in the workbook. 

 In the intermediate series, things changed quite a lot. We no longer use Spanish for the classes, and my teacher teaches everything in Chinese for the grammar she gives examples and situations where the structure would be used and to understand the vocabulary we use definitions in Chinese or images, and we create sentences for each new word, so that she can check whether we understand it.

Can you self study with them? 

I think it's quite possible to self-study with these books, mainly in the beginner series, that series would give you some great basis, and you can use them similarly as I did. You should also take into consideration that these books are quite different to the HSK; they'll give you a lot of knowledge and your Chinese skills will improve, but if in the future you want to take the HSK you'll have to use other resources. 

In my opinion, the only disadvantage about these books is that sometimes the grammar explanations are a bit short, but you can solve these by looking up the grammar structures in ChineseGrammarWiki or feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the grammar, and I'll share my notes with you. 

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