Chinese Through Tone and Color [Chinese] [Paperback]

I'm a real nut about reading reviews before I buy a product, but I've never written one before. I tried to write a very thorough review of this book, and I hope you find it helpful. The most important part is about the color methodology/strategy and is designated below by three asterisks.

As school wound down in April I began researching the Chinese language and decided to begin studying it this summer. I purchased three books from Amazon: The First 100 Chinese Characters, Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters, and Chinese Through Tone & Color.

Of those three, The First 100 Chinese Characters and Chinese Through Tone & Color were almost immediately set to the side. (Interestingly, The First 100 Chinese Characters and Learning Chinese Characters share the same author.)

From a production standpoint, this book is a beautiful little publication. The print quality is fantastic--the colors are bright, there's plenty of whitespace, and it's all done on high-quality paper. Two CDs are also included. I didn't use the first one (which is a regular audio CD), but I assume the content on the both are either the same or very close to the same. The second disc contains MP3 versions of the audio. The MP3s have images of the color-coded characters embedded in them that you will see in a program like iTunes and even on your iPod. I used those files for about a week while I was figuring out acquainting myself with tones. I've since found much more useful resources (such as pinyin charts with audio).

For content, it does include a lot of basic phrases and words, which is great. The introduction also does a good job at explaining tones and a bit about the Chinese language (which is standard for any book that teaches the first 100, 400, or 800 characters).

Before I get into the books approach (color-coding the tones) I want to point out some things that really limit the book and its usefulness to the learner.

This book is designed for total beginners, yet it fails to introduce the beginner to the stroke order of the characters. I'm new to Chinese, but I've learned enough in the last few months to know that it's important to build the right habits early on with writing characters. Also, writing the characters is a key to remembering them.

A second complaint is the layout from page to page. It's aesthetically beautiful, but not really that functional for learning. On one page you will have a single character take up almost the entire page, and on the next page there will be characters combined to form words presented in a very small typeface. The big characters feel too big to digest. The small characters intimidated me as a newbie. A stroke order chart could have easily been included on each of those character pages and made the book much more valuable to the beginner.

Another grievance is that instead of simply including a character that is not covered in the book, Dummitt does this: ''''zhangfu. Why not at least let the reader see the new characters and place the pinyin above/below as is done with other (yet unlearned) characters throughout the book?

Oh, one more thing that bugs me. Instead of putting the diacritic marks above the pinyin (such as w' and lái) on the definitions page, the diacritic marks are stuck up in their on little box on the upper right of each page. On the alternate pages that have words and example sentences the pinyin words are colored, but the marks are absent. Why not just put them on the pinyin like everyone else does and let the beginner get used to seeing them? It might even assist in reinforcing the color to tone connection.

*** Okay, on to the colors. (Quick aside: I still have to say that I can't figure out how there are so many 5-star reviews on this book.) The color thing is cool aesthetically, but you're not likely to remember the tones of 3000 characters because you've seen and reviewed each one of them in one of five colors throughout your studies. I think that where Dummitt left this color approach will render it nearly useless in the long run (and if you're serious about learning Chinese, then you need to think about the long run). If you're just interested in learning a few characters and some words and short sentences, this book will likely do the trick. The color coding will probably even help during these 100 characters. But it won't be an effective long-term strategy.

I believe the colors could have been taken further if Dummitt would have combined the colors with the definition of the character. For example, the character for the number "eight" is ' and has the first tone (b'). In the book the first tone is represented by red. Well, think about eight red apples or something like that, and it may aid you down the road when you get past the first 30, 50, 80, 140, and 350 characters. (This strategy of visualizing things like this begins to cross over into the realm of how Learning Chinese Characters, which I HIGHLY recommend for long-term study).

I wanted to make a couple remarks about the 1-star review by Dr. Howatt. First I wanted to point out that now this color scheme does extend beyond this book (but only in one source that I know of). I'm actually using the color scheme that Dummitt prescribes in this book in my Chinese studies. It turns out that in March MDBG (which created the CEDICT English-Chinese dictionary project) adopted the same color scheme, with the exception of using gray instead of black for the "neutral tone"). I use a spaced-repetition system (SRS--this is something very helpful for ingraining characters into your memory) called Anki which happens to have a plugin (called the pinyin toolkit) that's linked to the CEDICT dictionary and automatically colors the characters and pinyin placed in particular fields according to this color scheme (I know that was a long sentence, but oh well). I really like the added color to break up the monotony studying black text all the time.

So, if you're really into this color thing, look up Anki and the pinyin toolkit for the long-term.

Second, I don't think that Dummitt using some new, self-created romanization of Chinese as Dr. Howatt asserts. I'm pretty sure he's just using regular old pinyin (minus the diacritic marks).

Third, I'm totally on board with Dr. Howatt wondering what's up with all these 5-star reviews. I would not recommend this book for any beginner (primarily because of the lack of stroke orders), much less consider it a worthwhile resource to have on my shelf. Some of these reviewers are heralding this as a "great advance in teaching Chinese" (Robert Perron) and possibly making "a major contribution to the second-language learning of Chinese" (Perry Link from Princeton). It's cool having colorful characters and pinyin, but it's not going to make learning Chinese that much more efficient. I can see some people reading colored characters and pinyin in Anki and matching the appropriate tones to them, but the pinyin will still have the diacritic marks anyway.

So in closing...

If you're serious about learning Chinese, but a different book. Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters will give you 800 characters for a couple more dollars on Amazon, and the method (attaching stories and archetypes to characters and tones) will, with good study patterns, benefit you the most in the long run. And it will teach you how to write the characters! Don't become an illiterate foreigner!

So back on the shelf it goes. I might grab it in a few months to look at some of the phrases and words in it when I'm at that point (I'm trying to get to over a thousand characters with pronunciations in the next couple months, then I'll start on words and sentences), but overall it's not that helpful to someone who's learning Chinese in the long-term.

In the pronunciation of any human language, risings and fallings of pitch, called "intonation," can be used to convey meaning. If someone asks you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, you might say "What?!" in a rising tone to express your shock at the suggestion. Then, after absorbing the message and deciding to reject it emphatically, you might say "No!", using a falling tone.
Chinese does this as well, but in addition uses the same kinds of differences in pitch in the same way it uses vowels and consonants--to tell which word you are using. Just as, in English, the difference between i and e makes all the difference between bit and bet, so in Chinese a rising or falling tone makes all the difference between tú `chart' and tù `vomit'.
Infants in China absorb these tonal patterns without noticing that they are doing so. Second-language learners of Chinese cannot do that. If you assume that all you have to do in learning Chinese is to get the vowels and consonants right and let the tones "come naturally," you will cripple your oral Chinese for life. Decades of experience in Chinese language teaching have shown that students who make this assumption form bad habits from the start and often never recover.
The cost of bad tones is usually not that you are misunderstood literally. Chinese people are smart enough to figure out from context whether you mean "chart" or "vomit". The cost is that your voice sounds extremely abnormal--almost if you had a severe birth defect or were on drugs. It is certainly not the voice you would want to use if you were trying to negotiate a business deal, discuss human rights, or make a personal friend.
To get a sense for how bad tone-free Chinese sounds, you can compare it to vowel-free English. Try this experiment: Choose any simple English sentence. Then choose any vowel, at random. Decide whether you want it to be a "short" or "long" vowel. Now, say your chosen sentence using only that vowel sound, for every single syllable. How weird do you sound? Would your listener understand your meaning? (Probably.) Would that person be inclined to like you or trust you? (No way.)
It is extremely important, therefore, that a second-language learner of Chinese consciously master tones. Once good habits are formed, it becomes no longer necessary to pay conscious attention, but the beginning stages are crucial. In Chinese Through Tone and Color, Nathan Dummitt presents the radically innovative suggestion that beginners might associate Chinese tones with specific colors--red for one tone, orange for another, and so on. For the psychology of the beginning learner, this approach has the important advantage of making the tone seem part of the very nature of a word--not something added optionally, as intonation can be added in any languages. The method also makes tones impossible to ignore. Every time you see a word, or even think it, the color will remind you of the proper tone.
American grade schools and high schools have been adding Chinese-language programs at a record pace in recent years. Many of these programs, although based in the best of intentions, do not teach tones well. I look forward to seeing the results that Chinese Through Tone and Color might make. It could be that this book will make a major contribution to the second-language learning of Chinese.

Perry Link
Princeton University

First I started with Pimsleur, and then I bought this book to supplement Pimsleur. This book is amazing. I am grateful to the author for creating it. Don't buy this book by itself, however, and expect to learn Chinese from it alone. It's a vocab and grammar book in one, and although it comes with audio cds, it's just too dense to read straight through. That's why I say it's the PERFECT supplement to use with an audio program like Pimsleur. As you learn the words with Pimsleur, you can look them up in this book and learn how to write and read them as well.