The DeFrancis readers for Chinese

Open Forum in English
1

I’m just curious to see whether anyone on this board has used John DeFrancis’ readers for learning to read Chinese. I recently purchased the first two volumes, and it’s fantastic. To anyone wondering how to go about learning characters, I’d recommend reading up on this series.

Basically each lesson introduces 10 characters and kind of contains its own internal spaced repetition system:

Single Characters:
(1) Five times in the lesson of first occurrence…
(2) Twice in the next lesson…
(3) Once after a gap of one or two lessons
(4) Once in the unit-final lesson
(5) Once in the first half and once again in the second half of all succeeding units

"Special Combinations [words or phrases of more than one character]
(1) Three times in the lesson of first occurrence…
(2) Once in the next lesson…
(3) Once after a gap of one or two lessons
(4) Once in the unit-final lesson
(5) Thereafter at varied intervals determined by the difficulty and imporance of individual combinations.

Apparently there’s audio for the books too, but I haven’t actually acquired them yet, so I’m not sure how good they are.

These readers are supposedly quite well-known, so has anyone else on here studying Chinese used these before? What did you think of them?

2

That looks very interesting. The book I’m using at the moment (a book I found in a dusty box, and didn’t even know that I had…) is called “Read Chinese” (Book One) by Fang-yu Wang. Traditional characters though, plus Yale romanization, but it’s quite easy to get the hang of.

Several characters (and combinations) are introduced in each lesson, presented in sample sentences and a short story, and repeated throughout the whole book.

I might have a look att DeFrancis’ works.