Anything Goes: An Advanced Reader of Modern Chinese - Revised Edition (The Princeton Language Program: Modern Chinese)

It shipped very quickly, and its very affordable compared to those sold at my school's bookstore. The lines between the text is larger and allows for notes or pronunciation guidance. The stories are relevant and interesting. Great book to learn Chinese with.

Good condition

I am currently using this book in my fourth-year Chinese class at university. I have not studied Chinese formally before this, since I have Chinese parents, but I found the comprehensive wordlists that accompany each text to make them fully understandable and readable for me, which is otherwise frustrating (nobody likes Chinese dictionaries). The texts are generally drawn from newspapers or other similar sources, so you are reading real Chinese and not something composed for the book. I don't imagine there are many people buying this who don't have to for their class, but rest assured it's a useful and well written book. Includes both Simplified and Traditional characters.

Scanned copy of original book. I was looking for an ebook so I could use the kindle dictionary to look up words while studying. This is only scanned images and doesn't allow word look up, making it much less useful to study.

This book is helpful for those who have a good conversational grasp of Mandarin Chinese and can read some. It seems like after studying for several years one can reach a plateau that is difficult to overcome. This book is a careful selection from Mainland news papers. It is already out of date though with respect to the social environment in China. Overall, it is helpful to keep moving forward.

The book is OK for the purpose of Chinese language learning. Some articles are out dated. Some articles are from the Chinese communist party's official newspapers and documents, reflecting the party's political propaganda. Readers should be aware of the subtile but profound communist brainwash.

The book is satisfactory for those who have reached at least an intermediate level of Chinese proficiency. The articles are generally interesting or as best a language textbook can be. It has heft for sure and the topics contained are varied for a good smattering of vocab. On the other hand I find its definitions for words lacking, often giving only a couple English words and no Chinese definition. Its explanation of grammar is also less than satisfactory I feel.Given the varied nature of the articles and the style with which they are presented I feel it is satisfactory but I say this with caveats considering its less than stellar presentation of the "meat and potatoes" of language learning.

The good:The topics are interesting and diverse, I like the length (usually about 2 pages each) and you definitely get a lot of content in this book.The bad:It's my understanding the author editing these articles for suitability, but he needs to take it a step further. Some chapters are pretty easy to digest, while others become nothing but an exercise in looking up obscure words. Example: for chapter five I counted 182 vocabulary items. That's for a relatively short article.If you need to list 182 vocabulary items that your reader might not know, you're not doing a good job of selecting appropriate material. I know this is an advanced text but you want your students to "stretch" a little and both practice what they have learned while picking up a digestable amount of new material. Who wants to spend their evening thumbing back and forth six times per sentence to play find the rarely used word?Then in a comical reversal, the grammar points are often things almost any upper level student should know. Example:ling4 wai4 (in addition)zai4... shi2 (while, at the time of)qi4 zhong1 (among)yuan2 lai2 (at first originally)etc.So we are to have this book that is advanced enough where author is comfortable with giant vocab lists, but we'll throw in relatively basic grammar patterns?I liked All Things Considered a lot more, I think students at the higher levels would be better served simply having another at same level as that, it'll help more than this thing.