Well, it's a 3-minute introduction, and it's specifically focused on character mnemonics. Of course it leaves stuff out.
But my real complaint here is the notion of a "royal road", an ideal path that works best for most students. This goes against 50 years of experience at the US Foreign Service Institute. Let me quote them:
Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single “right” syllabus. Students at FSI and in other government language training programs have learned and still do learn languages successfully from syllabi based on audio-lingual practice of grammatical patterns, linguistic functions, social situations, task-based learning, community language learning, the silent way, and combinations of these and other approaches.
Let me back this up with some personal experiences. I currently speak French at a level between CEFRL B1 and B2. In other words, I can carry on a social conversation or follow a science documentary on TV, but I can't watch movies or function as an educated adult.
And I didn't even look at French grammar book until recently. Instead, (1) I overlearned hours of French audio and text with help from English translations, and (2) I spoke with native French speakers. I learned a huge fraction of French grammar from context and occasionally reading a footnote in Assimil New French with Ease.
So when I first read a grammar book that claimed, "French tends to avoid the passive voice," I thought, "Well, yeah, because I can always use an impersonal subject with 'on', or a reflexive thingy like 'il se dit'. After all, it's nicer that way."
So if I were going to learn Chinese, I'd begin by working very hard on tones and pronunciation. But after that, I would try to pick up the basic grammar from context. If Chinese strongly favors stative verbs to copulas, I want to figure that out by reading Chinese, not by reading grammar books.
This isn't to say that the "Beginning Chinese Reader" isn't excellent. I'm sure it works wonderfully for a great many people. But there's a half-dozen good ways to learn any language, and Memrise or LingQ or full-time conversational immersion might work better for somebody else.
But my real complaint here is the notion of a "royal road", an ideal path that works best for most students. This goes against 50 years of experience at the US Foreign Service Institute. Let me quote them:
Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single “right” syllabus. Students at FSI and in other government language training programs have learned and still do learn languages successfully from syllabi based on audio-lingual practice of grammatical patterns, linguistic functions, social situations, task-based learning, community language learning, the silent way, and combinations of these and other approaches.
Let me back this up with some personal experiences. I currently speak French at a level between CEFRL B1 and B2. In other words, I can carry on a social conversation or follow a science documentary on TV, but I can't watch movies or function as an educated adult.
And I didn't even look at French grammar book until recently. Instead, (1) I overlearned hours of French audio and text with help from English translations, and (2) I spoke with native French speakers. I learned a huge fraction of French grammar from context and occasionally reading a footnote in Assimil New French with Ease.
So when I first read a grammar book that claimed, "French tends to avoid the passive voice," I thought, "Well, yeah, because I can always use an impersonal subject with 'on', or a reflexive thingy like 'il se dit'. After all, it's nicer that way."
So if I were going to learn Chinese, I'd begin by working very hard on tones and pronunciation. But after that, I would try to pick up the basic grammar from context. If Chinese strongly favors stative verbs to copulas, I want to figure that out by reading Chinese, not by reading grammar books.
This isn't to say that the "Beginning Chinese Reader" isn't excellent. I'm sure it works wonderfully for a great many people. But there's a half-dozen good ways to learn any language, and Memrise or LingQ or full-time conversational immersion might work better for somebody else.