Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar (Modern Grammars)

Claudia Ross improves and expands the work she did for Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar with a thorough and easy-to-use grammar guide for both beginning and intermediate learners. Chapter titles separate the language into clear and concise entires that are easy to navigate and provide hundreds of example sentences. "Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar" is exhaustively cross-indexed by chapter number to help learners distinguish between multiple uses of the same word/character. Overall, an excellent resource for serious students of the language!


Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color

This is a simple, straight forward book to study the Mandarin Chinese language. It is actually a myths-buster. Having had a cursory glance at my copy borrowed from the library, I was convinced that Chinese is not particularly more difficult to learn than any other language. Although the authors do not claim this to be a book for the beginner, even a pre-beginner like myself found it to be easy to follow.

Writing the Chinese characters still remains elusive, and awe inspiring, but this work succeeds eminently in making sense of how those letters combine to form words. Imagine the delight one can get to find out that Chinese nouns, and pronouns do not undergo any changes with gender, tenses, cases, etc. in most instances.

This excellent work encourages the student by removing the fear generated by fear mongers and "linguo-phobes" by talking about 3-6000 characters, some with 40-50 pen strokes, several dialects, four tones of saying a sound, and so on, without ever explaining how such a language has survived for 30+ centuries.

The customary approach of learning the alphabet, before learning to use the language, would probably frighten away many new comers to Chinese. Grammar (first part of the book) generally is not the best way to begin learning a new language. However, quickly reading through the early pages of this work takes one a long way. It gives much needed confidence. There is no learning by rote, memorizing lists of words, or phrases without understanding them.

I have not yet reached the applied grammar (second part), but I am beginning to feel quite comfortable with the language. The book is very well organized, elegantly produced, and more than reasonably priced. One would be happy to pay that much for a lesson or two, and will get out only a fraction of what the book offers. I am ordering my own copy right now.

If you are studying Chinese then you really need a grammar book as a companion to your other course materials. This will serve as a good reference which can be referred to when needed. The fact that the second half of the book focuses on functional (i.e. situational) grammar makes it easy to find the relevant grammar pattern. I won't go into too many details - you can read that in the review(s) below. I still have some grammar questions that the book doesn't answer but it is the best I have found so far. One area where the book is weak is on directional complements which can be unnatural for the western learner. Good luck on your learning!!

After having used previous Chinese grammar books, such as those from Yip Po-ching, I found this one to offer a better organization of grammar patterns. The book is split into two sections. The first focuses on grammar patterns and the other which focuses on situational aspects of the language. These two approaches works great when learning how best to put together sentences.

The book presents the material in Simplified/Traditional/PinYin. I also went ahead and got the workbook for this text and was also greatly pleased with the exercises presented.

I would follow up your Chinese studies with a character dictionary (focusing on the 2000 most frequently used characters), and a vocabulary book such as those offered by HSK. With these resources you'll likely succeed in your Chinese studies. Oh, and don't forget ChinesePod; it's a great resource for Chinese listening comprehension.

I just started to learn Chinese a couple of months ago, when I felt the need for a grammar book.

This book uses very simple vocabulary, which I can already understand. The grammar is explained with sample sentences all the time. The sample sentences are 'written' with both simplified and traditional characters.

PartB is the really rich part, where not only additional grammar is presented (past, future, location, etc.), but also common and everyday expressions and situations (phone, agreement, etc.) are also explained.

In my opinion it is very comprehensive, not only on beginner level. The grammar terms are simple - not like an 'official', heavy grammar book, which makes it easy for a beginner, but it is far from shallow for an advanced student either.

I can only recommend it!! Currently I don't think I'll need any other Chinese grammar book in the near future...