Foreign Language Study

This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition.

Unlike most textbooks, Reading Sanskrit devotes as much attention to the formation of individual words (morphology) as to the various, frequently unfamiliar ways those words combine to form sentences (syntax). This approach equips students with invaluable linguistic insights into Sanskrit usage and style, enabling them to engage more confidently with original Sanskrit texts.

Challenging topics are broken down into manageable sections and spread across multiple lessons. Each lesson includes plainly worded explanations, abundant annotated examples, and vocabulary notes providing the relevant cultural context needed to understand the ideas and narratives introduced in the exercises and readings. Audio recordings and other supplementary online resources help students improve their pronunciation and enhance accessibility further.

Reading Sanskrit draws from the Buddhist tradition’s vast Sanskrit corpus to present a thematically coherent collection of texts covering a wide range of literary genres, including narrative, philosophical, and poetic writings. This unique choice of source material provides an engaging approach to language learning, immersing the student in one of the major strands of South Asian spirituality and culture while highlighting Buddhism’s connection to other religious and literary traditions.

Classical Japanese: A Grammar is a comprehensive, and practical guide to classical Japanese. Extensive notes and historical explanations make this volume useful as both a reference for advanced students and a textbook for beginning students. The volume, which explains how classical Japanese is related to modern Japanese, includes detailed explanations of basic grammar, including helpful, easy-to-use tables of grammatical forms; annotated excerpts from classical premodern texts.

Classical Japanese: A Grammar - Exercise Answers and Tables (ISBN: 978-0-231-13530-6) is available for purchase as a separate volume.

In 2005, the celebrated scholar of Japanese literature Haruo Shirane published Classical Japanese: A Grammar. Now, with Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary, he completes his two-volume textbook for learning classical, or literary, Japanese—the primary written language in Japan from the seventh to the mid-twentieth century. The text contains carefully selected readings that address a wide array of grammatical concerns and that steadily progress from easy to difficult. The selections encompass a wide range of historical periods and styles, including essays, fiction, and poetry from such noted works as The Tale of Genji, The Tales of Ise, The Pillow Book, The Tales of the Heike, and Essays in Idleness, and such authors as Ihara Saikaku, Matsuo Basho, Ueda Akinari, Motoori Norinaga, and Fukuzawa Yukichi. Each reading is accompanied by a short English introduction, a vocabulary list, and extensive grammatical notes, and ends with a comprehensive grammatical annotation.

The classical Japanese-English dictionary composes the last third of the book and features approximately 2,500 key words, highlighting those used most frequently. The first of its kind, this volume is a vital tool for students, scholars, and translators of classical Japanese.

This first-of-its-kind, two-volume primer is addressed to meet the needs of the rapidly growing number of Chinese language students who were raised in the United States in Chinese-speaking homes and can speak the language but who cannot read or write it. The book's lessons and exercises build upon the cultural knowledge of these "advanced beginners" in order to facilitate full language acquisition.

As a culture-based primer, this text takes an unusual and innovative approach, with lessons organized around readings on Chinese history, culture, geography, literature, folktales and mythology, customs, and cuisine. The focus, therefore, is not on sentence grammar, but rather on reading strategies and on "discourse grammar," a new, more authentic approach to the study of languages.

This textbook teaches the basics of French grammar, reinforcing its lessons with exercises and key practice translations. A systematic guide, the volume is a critical companion for university-level students learning to read and translate written French into English; for graduate scholars learning to do research in French or prepping for proficiency exams; and for any interested readers who want to improve their facility with the French language. In addition, A Short Course in Reading French exposes readers to a broad range of French texts from the humanities and social sciences, including writings by distinguished francophone authors from around the world.

The book begins with French pronunciation and cognates and moves through nouns, articles, and prepositions; verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; a graduated presentation of all the indicative and subjunctive tenses; object, relative, and other pronouns; the passive voice; common idiomatic constructions; and other fundamental building blocks of the French language. Chapters contain translation passages from such authors as Pascal, Montesquieu, Proust, Sartre, Bourdieu, Senghor, Césaire, de Certeau, de Beauvoir, Barthes, and Kristeva. Drawn from more than two decades of experience teaching French to students from academic and nonacademic backgrounds, Celia Brickman's clear, accessible, and time-tested format enables even beginners to develop a sophisticated grasp of the language and become adept readers of French.

There is an answer key for translation exercises and for non-copyrighted translation passages available to professors and teachers who have assigned this title in a class. Please provide your name, title, institution, and number of students in the course in an email to coursematerials@columbiauniversitypress.com.

This textbook teaches the basics of French grammar, reinforcing its lessons with exercises and key practice translations. A systematic guide, the volume is a critical companion for university-level students learning to read and translate written French into English; for graduate scholars learning to do research in French or prepping for proficiency exams; and for any interested readers who want to improve their facility with the French language. In addition, A Short Course in Reading French exposes readers to a broad range of French texts from the humanities and social sciences, including writings by distinguished francophone authors from around the world.

The book begins with French pronunciation and cognates and moves through nouns, articles, and prepositions; verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; a graduated presentation of all the indicative and subjunctive tenses; object, relative, and other pronouns; the passive voice; common idiomatic constructions; and other fundamental building blocks of the French language. Chapters contain translation passages from such authors as Pascal, Montesquieu, Proust, Sartre, Bourdieu, Senghor, Césaire, de Certeau, de Beauvoir, Barthes, and Kristeva. Drawn from more than two decades of experience teaching French to students from academic and nonacademic backgrounds, Celia Brickman's clear, accessible, and time-tested format enables even beginners to develop a sophisticated grasp of the language and become adept readers of French.

There is an answer key for translation exercises and for non-copyrighted translation passages available to professors and teachers who have assigned this title in a class. Please provide your name, title, institution, and number of students in the course in an email to coursematerials@columbiauniversitypress.com.

This book is at once a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and an innovative textbook for the study of classical Chinese. It is a companion volume to How to Read Chinese Prose: A Guided Anthology, designed for Chinese-language learners.

How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese presents more than forty prose works, either excerpts or in full, from antiquity through the Qing dynasty. While teaching readers how to appreciate the rich tradition of Chinese prose in its original form, the book uses these texts to introduce classical Chinese to advanced learners, helping them develop reading comprehension and vocabulary. It offers a systematic guide to classical Chinese grammar and abundant notes on vocabulary, and features an extensive network of notes, exercises, and cross-references. The book includes modern translations of the forty prose works in simplified Chinese, presented alongside the original texts in traditional Chinese. It also includes expert commentaries on each text’s distinctive aesthetic qualities as well as historical and cultural contexts.

The book comprises thirty-eight lessons within eight units, organized chronologically to reflect the emergence of major prose genres. It is a major contribution to the teaching and study of classical Chinese language and literature.

Audio recordings of all forty texts are available online free of charge.

This book is at once a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and an innovative textbook for the study of classical Chinese. It is a companion volume to How to Read Chinese Prose: A Guided Anthology, designed for Chinese-language learners.

How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese presents more than forty prose works, either excerpts or in full, from antiquity through the Qing dynasty. While teaching readers how to appreciate the rich tradition of Chinese prose in its original form, the book uses these texts to introduce classical Chinese to advanced learners, helping them develop reading comprehension and vocabulary. It offers a systematic guide to classical Chinese grammar and abundant notes on vocabulary, and features an extensive network of notes, exercises, and cross-references. The book includes modern translations of the forty prose works in simplified Chinese, presented alongside the original texts in traditional Chinese. It also includes expert commentaries on each text’s distinctive aesthetic qualities as well as historical and cultural contexts.

The book comprises thirty-eight lessons within eight units, organized chronologically to reflect the emergence of major prose genres. It is a major contribution to the teaching and study of classical Chinese language and literature.

Audio recordings of all forty texts are available online free of charge.

As the teaching of Chinese increasingly uses simplified characters, this new version of the popular A Primer for Advanced Beginners of Chinese fills an important gap in Chinese-language instruction.

The two-volume primer is addressed to meet the needs of the rapidly growing number of Chinese language students who were raised in the United States in Chinese-speaking homes and speak the language but cannot read or write it. This text develops lessons around readings on Chinese history, culture, geography, literature, folktales and mythology, customs, and cuisine.

Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese covers the five Cs—communication, cultures, comparisons, connections, and communities—and follows three communicative modes in lesson design: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. The authors arrange their lessons around four topics intrinsically interesting to students: the self, schooling, social customs, and the global village, fostering a full appreciation of Chinese culture. Each lesson contains warm-up activities, mini-dialogues, authentic readings, conversational relays, a cultural unit, examples of sentence patterns, and a vocabulary list. Two review lessons are geared specifically toward synthesizing and reinforcing the language and culture skills taught throughout the book, and footnote glossaries assist in reading comprehension.

Written by experienced Chinese language instructors, Chaoyue helps students reach the preadvanced proficiency level within two semesters, or approximately 150 to 180 hours of course time. The preadvanced stage is comparable to a fourth-semester college Chinese course, or 250 hours of instruction. Unlike other language texts, Chaoyue is printed in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, as well as the phonetic systems used in China (pinyin) and Taiwan (zhuyin fuhao). It also includes a CD-ROM with additional assignments and review as well as an online teacher manual.

Lesson sections include: •Warm-up activities that articulate the lesson's theme and activate students' prior knowledge

•Short readings in the form of letters, e-mails, reports, dialogues, stories, and interviews

•Dialogue practice with key vocabulary and sentence patterns

•Interactive activities such as surveys, debates, and small group discussions

•Conversational relays that ask pairs to complete minidialogues

•Authentic readings in the form of advertisements, Web sites, maps, and signs, with multiple-choice review questions

•Common expressions that relate to the lesson theme

Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese covers the five Cs—communication, cultures, comparisons, connections, and communities—and follows three communicative modes in lesson design: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. The authors arrange their lessons around four topics intrinsically interesting to students: the self, schooling, social customs, and the global village, fostering a full appreciation of Chinese culture. Each lesson contains warm-up activities, mini-dialogues, authentic readings, conversational relays, a cultural unit, examples of sentence patterns, and a vocabulary list. Two review lessons are geared specifically toward synthesizing and reinforcing the language and culture skills taught throughout the book, and footnote glossaries assist in reading comprehension.

Written by experienced Chinese language instructors, Chaoyue helps students reach the preadvanced proficiency level within two semesters, or approximately 150 to 180 hours of course time. The preadvanced stage is comparable to a fourth-semester college Chinese course, or 250 hours of instruction. Unlike other language texts, Chaoyue is printed in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, as well as the phonetic systems used in China (pinyin) and Taiwan (zhuyin fuhao). It also includes a CD-ROM with additional assignments and review as well as an online teacher manual.

Lesson sections include: •Warm-up activities that articulate the lesson's theme and activate students' prior knowledge

•Short readings in the form of letters, e-mails, reports, dialogues, stories, and interviews

•Dialogue practice with key vocabulary and sentence patterns

•Interactive activities such as surveys, debates, and small group discussions

•Conversational relays that ask pairs to complete minidialogues

•Authentic readings in the form of advertisements, Web sites, maps, and signs, with multiple-choice review questions

•Common expressions that relate to the lesson theme

Paired with the Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese language text, this workbook completes one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive language instruction tools currently available. The workbook cements students' interpersonal communication skills and their ability to present and interpret Chinese as it is spoken and written. Filled with authentic uses of the language from everyday life, the workbook, just like the textbook, paints a vivid portrait of the Chinese-speaking world for a variety of students to grasp. Also in line with the text, the workbook emphasizes communication, cultures, comparisons, connections, and communities, and includes relatable topics, such as the self, schooling, and social customs, altogether engendering an appreciation of Chinese within a solidly global context.

Instructors may request an answer key by sending an e-mail to Todd Lazarus at tdl10@columbia.edu. Please provide your name, title, institution, and number of students in the course.