Cheng Books

As the other reviewer noted, this is a poor quality production, particularly in light of how many institutions make use of these materials.

Here are a list of my criticisms:
1) There are only two speakers throughout the series, thus students only get exposed to two voices. Additionally, those two voices play the parts of numerous different characters, sometimes doing double duty in one dialogue. Sometimes using a male voice for a female character.
2) The speed of the speakers is unnaturally slow. There is an attempt made to provide three speeds for the dialogues, but it seems as if those three speeds were achieved by simply slowing down or speeding up the original recording. The speakers also take unnaturally long pauses between phrases (though not long enough for listen and repeat type practice). The overall intonation of sentences doesn't sound very natural either.
3) There are only recordings of the dialogues and a list of vocabulary for each lesson. In the readings of the dialogues, there are no pauses that would allow students time to repeat after a sentence. There are no sentence build-up drills that break down long phrases or target difficult spots. To be useful as more than listening practice the student will have to rely on the pause button.
4) It is too expensive.
I sympathize with the producers in so much as it is pain-staking and often dull work to make good recordings for use in language study, but considering how many of these must be sold and how important the influence of these recordings is on those hoping to be future Mandarin speakers, such obstacles ought to have been overcome.

The audio quality is poor, some annoying background noise. Not sure why but it's clearly worse once I ripped them (digital and converting to 160kbps MP3s in iTunes). Now it's still clearly noticeable when playing from the CDs (using the computer).

It's not only the audio quality that's poor, it's also clearly a low budget for the prodcution using only one female and one male voice even though the dialogues often have two female or male actors. A couple chinese teacher could probably spend a day or two producing the entire series using just two microphones and computer with CD burner. Amazing that this is supposed to be the most widely used text book in US.

The text itself is fairly understandable, current and consistant. The problems are mostly with the exercises, problems and on-line supplements and quizes, especially for the government and to a lesser extent, the non-profit accounting chapters. Not all of the wordings and answers in these areas have been updated to the current GASB 34 and 35 statements that the text is teaching to. This is a difficult topic to begin with and having these conflicts makes it that much more difficult to grasp the material correctly.

This book is impressive but in a cold impersonal way - I bought the book as a birthday present for myself given my intense interest in China and in gardening and returned it almost immediately. I realize this review is very vague and I cannot point to any discernable flaws in the book (other than its binding, which was cracking even as I removed it from the shrink wrap and opened it for the first time) it just left me very disatisfied.

Not really a very useful book. for the price I would have expected better.

If the editors' approach to the subject matter agrees with you, you will rate this book higher than I do. My objection is to its framework, not the quality of unmentioned contributions within that framework. One must be conscious of the agenda of Westerners in appropriating 'Eastern' philosophies, as well as of the claims of Asian philosophers about their traditions. Until recently, the most common theme was 'the meeting of East and West'. Westerners, when not indulging in escapism from modern (Western) civilization, tended to promote the notion of the complementarity of East and West. This is predicated on a dubious view of the essential characteristics of both civilizations, their philosophies and histories. Aside from occluding the sordid realities of 'Eastern' civilizations, this conception excludes recognition of the collusion of imperialism with local elites, and Marxism from philosophy and historical-social interpretation. Such exclusion is necessary to maintain the framework of 'East' and 'West' and the possible 'meanings' of each. There is also a history of how these notions of 'East' and 'West' were created as well as the ideological negotiations involving both parties. The presumption under which 'Eastern philosophy' is peddled is a defect not only of popular philosophy, but of the output of scholars with a perspective not supportable by their specific expertise alone.

The past quarter century has seen a new trend: in the Anglo-American sphere it is the rise of 'continental philosophy', and more generally 'postcolonialism', and finally 'globalization'. Most obnoxious to me are the combinations of traditional philosophies with postmodernism, e.g. mixing deconstruction or hermeneutics with indigenous philosophies--in the Chinese case, Confucianism or Taoism.

Under the 'modern' or 'postmodern' dispensations, when one views philosophy from a materialist or empiricist standpoint, there is something hopelessly artificial and arbitrary (trading on metaphor, mythology, and even theology) and ultimately sterile and obscurantist about maintaining a metaphysical system in the traditional sense, even one that purports to accommodate modern scientific discoveries. Updating traditional metaphysics is very much like updating and liberalizing religions.

Co-editor Bunnin in his Introduction indicates two categories of philosophers to be excluded: (1) lesser though better-known philosophers, mainly Mao; (2) Chinese philosophers whose work fits entirely into the category of Western philosophy, e.g. philosophy of science (including the dialectics of nature). That's a shame, for it is this second category that most interests me. Already a dubious policy is in place about what is distinctively Chinese. (Marxism is included in this anthology, based on those contributions considered most distinctively Chinese and original.)

In the final chapter, editor Cheng outlines five stages of Chinese philosophy's response to the challenge of the West (logic, science, analysis, identity issues), and sketches current issues (stage five) not treated in the previous chapters. The current issues are: (1) I Ching -- issue of change, (2) the human person, (3) moral metaphysics, (4) nonseparation of method & truth (traditional philosophy was methodologically underdeveloped), (5) science & scientific methodology -- problem for holism, (6) undeveloped political philosophy. Cheng claims traditions work like scientific theories (cf. Quine's holism) in the process of a dialogue of civilizations.

I consider the editor's last word to sum up the bankruptcy of the book's agenda. It's all about the packaging of a tradition, based on dubious metaphysics and premises. It turns out to be an ideological aspect of globalization hype. While one can gain usable information from this anthology, one would be well-advised to turn elsewhere for perspective and synthesis.

This is just another book cashing on the fact that China's economy is booming after entering the WTO. It isn't well written at all, and there's nothing very new here. The facts can easily be found in many other sources and the author provides few new perspectives. Not much worth whether to the academic or businessmen.

This book is out of print for a reason. While the idea is great: explore and tell about one of the culturally richest areas in the world - hanging coffins and 6000 year old villages amongst soaring peaks and treacherous rapids. Instead you hear about how the author had to get up early and there was nothing to eat.

Small book with lots of coloured pictures, not what I wanted. Hardly any information, about 6 written pages.

I really has a bad experience with books written by the author H-C Huang. The other one, Plate & Shell, is also the same thing. I suspect what he did are just taking the source code from their research group, modify it and to make money out of it. All the codes in those books are "goto" code --- code filled with goto statement. I sincerely advice those who which to buy this book give it a second thought. The technique outlined in this book is out of date, and is really fundamental stuff. It lacks insight, motivation and does not show any realistic application of the FEM for heat transfer problem.

I mistakenly bought this book, and now I will regret for the rest of my life for the price I paid. The authors used a double line spaceing, 13 pt font to fill up the whole book with space and large font. The problem illusrated are all well known problem CFD problem, like potential flow.