Chinese

This dictionary is designed to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters. It has the following features: -Every character entry includes a brief traditional Chinese etymology. -Genealogical charts highlight the connections between characters, showing the creation of more than 4000 characters from less than 200 simple pictographs and ideographs. -Mandarin standards in China and Taiwan are distinguished. -Simplified forms for each character are given. -Character entries list all words which use the character in any position, allowing a word to be found even if the first character is unknown. -English definitions are referenced in an English-Chinese index. -A word pronunciation index allows students to directly search for an overheard word without having to guess the initial character. -A stroke count index lists every character by number of strokes.

View all Pathways books Details: Author(s): Scott McGinnis, Editor Type: Book Details: Contents: CH. 1 Toward a Communicative Model for Teaching and Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language: Exploring Some New Possibilities CH. 2 Reinventing Language Fields: The Chinese Case CH. 3 Tonal Distinction Errors by Beginning Chinese Language Students: A Comparative Study of American English and Japanese Native Speaker CH. 4 Exploiting Background Knowledge in the Development of Chinese Pedagogical Reading Materials CH. 5 Acquisition of Modal Particles in Chinese Second Language Learners CH. 6 Class Plan for Teaching Chinese as a Functional Language CH. 7 Starting a Secondary School Chinese Program CH. 8 Designing an Intensive Chinese Curriculum CH. 9 Citizens of a Global Village: Information Technology and Chinese Language Instruction--A Search for Standards CH. 10 A Review of Some Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Software for Chinese CH. 11 Linguistically Accurate and Culturally Appropriate: The Use of Authentic Video in Chinese Language Instruction

Mary S. Erbaugh has compiled this volume to examine the so-called "ideographic myth" from a variety of perspectives. Through this multidisciplinary collection of articles, we learn how the myth has come about, what sort of theory and empirical evidence have been generated to refute it, and how this myth has stubbornly persisted to hamper progress in a number of scholarly areas. But perhaps most importantly, this volume presents in a detailed manner how different academic disciplines go about analyzing historical and empirical data in order to arrive at new knowledge.

This book examines the "celebratory," ritualistic and pragmatic functions that Shandong yanxi, or banquets, serve in games of gaining social status in the contemporary Shandong social milieu. Yanxi are a highly ritualized form of performance in which enormous amounts of social capital, and energy are invested. Shandong yanxi are conducted to celebrate such important social occasions as weddings and engagements; festivals; birthdays; sending a friend or relative off on a journey, and welcoming a traveler home from a journey. Although highly festive in nature, these performances play a more serious and pragmatic role in Shandong society as a field of play for the game of gaining social status.