[.ca] Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (ISBN 0520066103)

brain pain:
This is not for the regular student of Chinese. Too much techno mumbo-jumbo. If you are a linguist, then good. Might help with specific questions. I think the Routledge grammar books are more usefull to the student. "Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook" seems great so far. There are also "Chinese: An Essential Grammar" and "Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook". I hope to get the other two soon. I also looked at "Practical Chinese Grammar" and it looks very good. It is a companion to the "Practical Chinese Reader" series. These other books seem to be a better place to learn from than this heavy scholarly book. Zain jian Zhu Ni Hao yun

The book can only fool non-native speakers of Chinese:
As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, I found this book contains too much seemingly complicated rules. However, a little Sprachgefuehl(feeling for the tongue) led me to the conclusion that the rules and categories are hocus pocus, i.e., they do NOT reflect the actual way we speak the language. This is a serious problem, becuase linguistics is descriptive in nature. If the rules proposed in the book do not adequately reflect reality, then they are useless. I doubt if the example senteces were really secured from native speakers. Non-native speakers might be dumbfounded by the apparent complexity of the book and think it is too scholarly. In fact, howver, they are only fooled into thinkning so because they are dealing with a subject they are not familiar with--Mandarin Chinese, in this case.

No chinese character:
This does not pretend to be a review but just an advise for people like me who thought they would find any chinese characters inside this book: there are none. I bought the book to use it as a complement to my chinese studies but found to my absolute surprise that it doesn't contain even a single chinese character (except the ones in the front cover) making its study extremely difficult. I really appreciate the work the authors have done and I don't have anything to say about the book as such but I find it sad that the examples are written in romanized chinese instead of chinese characters. As this is not a compalint about the book but about the presentation, I'd rather not assign any stars to it.\o...\c Hmmmm..., it seems they force me to do so. Let me then be impartial and assign three...

Good supplementary reading:
This is a good book for a student of Chinese at the high-intermediate level or above as a supplementary grammar. It's too long-winded and difficult to use as a practical look-up guide to help when you help forming a given sentence for your homework assignment. It's not a dictionary of grammar "how to's". The books by Yip and Rimmington are better for that. Instead, it's good background reading on the "why's" of the language after you already know the "how to's". For example, you can read the chapter on aspect and gain a deeper understanding of the logic of why certain sentences work and others don't and where the subtleties lie. For this book is more of a scholarly, systematic analysis of Mandarin grammar than a "teach yourself" guide. Li and Thompson are progressive rather than conservative in what they accept as sayable. Some sentences I've never come across in my several years of learning Mandarin. So I'm not surprised that some native speakers have called the grammar in this book wrong. The reason is that Li and Thompson haven't limited their grammar to reflect what's typical in Mandarin, but have tried to include what is POSSIBLE. They don't just include "standard Putonghua" but have included controversial uses and regional variations. In fact, Li and Thompson freely admit in their preface that some native speakers will disagree with some of the sentences in this book while other native speakers will disagree with other sentences. Mandarin has never been totally uniform and certain usages remain controversial and non-universal. I have often found textbooks disagreeing with each other. I also have found native speakers disagreeing with each other too. As others have written, the tone of this book is scholarly, and not easily digestible, and there are no Chinese characters, only pinyin (but what's the problem with that? There is never any chance of mistaking one word for another since each Chinese word is translated into English). If you can live with these shortcomings, I recommend this book for more serious, academically-orientated students as a supplement to your other grammar books.

A nice reference:
True to the title, this is indeed a nice reference book on Chinese grammar, something I would like to keep on my bookshelf next to the dictionaries. It is easy to read, at least for a student with some experience of reading grammar books and a prior exposure to basic linguistic terminology. A large number of both positive and negative examples are helpful in making grammar rules easier to understand. Now, two minor complaints. First, if the authors were to prepare a new edition, I wish they had used page space a bit more economically. It seems that by slightly tightening spacing between the words in the examples, many examples that now stretch to 2 or 3 lines could be compressed into one or two. Doing this could significantly reduce the page count. Or, even better, the freed space could be used to give parallel text in Hanzi (Chinese characters) next to each example. One would think that with moder typesetting that would not be too complicated, unlike in 1981, when the book first appeared. While Hanzi are not strictly necessary -- tone marks and Englsih translation of every word allows one to look any word in a dictionary -- printing them next to the examples would provide additional visiual cues to those readers who already know their characters, and an additional opportunity to learn useful characters (e.g., the three different "-de" suffixes) "by osmosis" to those who are still learning.