Reviews for Mastering Chinese: The Complete Course for Beginners (Palgrave Master Series (Languages))

The average rating for Mastering Chinese: The Complete Course for Beginners (Palgrave Master Series (Languages)) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-21 00:00:00 Charlyne Blomberg “Don Quixote”, I answered, and looked into almost shocked facial expressions, followed by quiet, uncomfortable giggling. What was the question? If my friends at the coffee table had asked: “What is your favourite book, Lisa?”, and received that answer, they would have nodded knowingly, sympathetically, adding some random fact about the 1000+-page-classic I claimed to love more than the countless other books I have read. But that was not the question. It was: “With which literary character do you identify most?” I was not the first one around the table to answer, and there had been plenty of identification with the brave, the strong, the pretty, the good, the clever heroes and heroines of the literary universe before it was my turn. I had time to think, and to think carefully. There is no one like Don Quixote to make me feel the connection between my reading self and my real life. Who else loved books to the extent that he was willing to immerse himself completely in the illusion of his beloved fiction, against all reason? Who else struggled to survive and keep the spirit of beautiful ideas in the face of ugly, mean, bullying reality? Why was there such awkwardness when I said I identified with Don Quixote? Because he is clumsy, he is bullied by the brutal ordinary people who can’t stand a mind focused on literary thoughts and idealist ideas, he is treated badly and made fun of. He is so very UNCOOL! He makes a silly figure in the ordinary society where appearance and participation in shared activities are more important to social survival and reputation than reflective thinking and expression of individuality. He is off the main track, and that is only acceptable to the world if you are a strong, fighting, violent hero, not if you are a harmless, yet ridiculous dreamer. If you can’t be one of the group, you have to be stronger, more violent than the majority. Just being different is the most dangerous, the most hated thing in the world. Still! But I don’t think there was much choice for Don Quixote. He had seen the raging madness of the world, and made a decision: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” In the most famous scene of all, the dialogue between Sancho Pansa and Don Quixote reveals the deliberate choice to see more in life than just the mere practicalities of food provision and business: "What giants?" Asked Sancho Pansa. "The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long." "Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone." "Obviously," replied Don Quixote, "you don't know much about adventures.” If you only have one life to live, why choose the boredom of reality when your mind can create an imaginary adventure of giant proportions? What a wonderful match they are, the idealist dreamer and his realist companion, complementing each other perfectly while exploring the real world in the same way Dante and Virgil complement and support each other’s thoughts while they explore the fantastic fiction of Afterlife in the Divine Comedy. To me there is more heroism in seeing a perfect horse in the lame Rosinante, or a beautiful woman in the ugly, mean Dulcinea, than there could ever be in the strongest superhero riding the most powerful horse and gaining the love of the most stunning lady. That is a no-brainer, while it requires deeper thinking skills to see the adventure and beauty in average, weak, ugly life. The moment Don Quixote turns ridiculous, and sad and “quixotic” in my world, is the moment before death when he renounces his ideal in favour of the mainstream understanding of Christian “comme il faut”, breaking Sancho Pansa’s heart, who, in his own, realist and practical way, understands the world’s need for characters like Don Quixote. The sanity Don Quixote gains when he dictates his last testament is the capitulation of the tired, worn-out spirit. He has already stopped living. Another of my favourite windmill-fighting characters, Jean Barois, foresaw the weakness of old age and wrote his testament to the world at the height of his intellectual power, thus haunting the bigot winners of his dying body afterwards with his words of idealistic power from the other side of the grave. And for all those who smile at Don Quixote: it is much braver, and harder, to fight inanimate, mechanised windmills than fire-spitting dragons! And: you have to have more than an ounce of Don Quixote in you to try to review this book of superlatives!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-09 00:00:00 Chris Batie “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” Why did no one tell me this book is hilarious? I can't believe it took me so long to finally pick it up. Don Quixote is densest in the early chapters, which are packed full of footnotes that should be read for full context. I highly recommend using two bookmarks-- one for your place in the story and one for in the notes. If this seems too much like hard work, I want to reassure you that the notes become less frequent as you progress through the book, but they add some very helpful background information in the beginning. If you don't know what it's about, Don Quixote follows the titular character and his lovable squire, Sancho Panza, as the former declares himself a knight-errant and goes looking for noble adventures. The context is important here because, at the time of the novel, chivalry romances like Amadis De Gaula had become so popular in Spain that monarchs of the time feared the influence of them on the impressionable minds of young people. Cervantes responded by writing a parody of these knightly adventures. Don Quixote has read so many of these books that they have had a profound effect on his mental state. He gets caught up in a fictional world created by his imagination and truly believes that not only is he a knight, but the inns he encounters are castles, the prostitutes are princesses, and the windmills are... giants. This latter is, apparently, an iconic moment in the novel and I can definitely see why-- it is so funny. I read it through about five times and laughed each time. I think it's the way I hear Sancho saying "What giants?" in my mind that cracks me up. The adventures do feel repetitive at times, and I don't feel like either Part 1 or Part 2 needed to be as long as it was. The buffoonish squabbles get old after a while. However, I really enjoyed the switch to a more meta style in the second part, which the notes will tell you was published some ten years after the first. In this, Cervantes explores the idea of characters knowing they were being written about, and the book takes a more philosophical - and arguably darker - turn. I read some critical interpretations alongside the book, and I found Edith Grossman's especially interesting. She says she saw Don Quixote as a terribly depressing book. Nabokov, too, called it "cruel and crude" (that's the guy who wrote about the stalking and raping of a child). And though there are many moments of humour, I don't disagree with them. There is something undeniably sad about this book, too. Maybe it is sad because this man is so deluded, so wrapped up in fictions. Maybe it is the way he allows himself to be deceived, and the ways others take advantage of this chance at deception. But I think, personally, that it is sad because none of it is real. Don Quixote wants something admirable, to do good, defend the weak and defeat the bad guys, but it is all in his naive imagination. I don't know what was truly intended by the ending but, unlike some, I don't see it as a final victory. Instead I see it as a sad loss of something important. Either way, I am glad to have finally read this book. We can argue about interpretations, but Don Quixote's impact on western literature cannot be overstated. Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube