Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Awful June 16, 2008
I'd give it 0 stars if I could. I used to be a language teacher and this book uses a very outdated methodology (audio lingual) which is based on repetition rather than a more modern approach to language learning called communicative competence.
If you sign up for to learn Chinese and they use this book run do not walk to the registrar to drop the course and find a program that uses a more up-to-date approach to language learning.
 book is good, but the cd is not that useful May 19, 2008
For native English speakers, the book is excellent. However the CD leaves much to be desired. The CD is all in Chinese, and therefore difficult to follow for a complete beginner in the language.
 A nice introduction May 17, 2008
I'm just starting out with (teaching myself) the Chinese language, and this book seemed like it was the best one to start with (being under $20 was a really nice bonus too!) I asked a native speaker to help me choose this, and she approved of it over several others. Anyway, I'm on the second lesson, and I've found it to be a good introduction. There seems to be a nice balance of vocabulary, grammar and general insight of the language in each lesson.
The only complaint I have with this book is the format of the CD that accompanies the lessons when compared to the format of the lessons: The book has sentence structures and conversations before the vocabulary, but the CD has arranged them vocabulary first and follows up with sentence patterns and conversations (which is the more logical order.) The complaint is small enough to not knock any points off, but worth mentioning as a heads up to prospective buyers.
A nice accompaniment for those interested in thoroughly learning the language might be "Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition" by McNaughton.
Beginner's Chinese April 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is too difficult for beginners plus you have to sit as if in a classroom and follow the CD with the book. I also bought Pimsleur CD's for beginner's Chinese and it was an excellent choice.
I'm glad I didn't spend much money for this product.
 Could be better... February 29, 2008
This product is good, but is definately not the best. The first complaint I have is that it does not explain the use of the CD's, and it took me a while to figure out how to use the CDs (which only pronounces the vocab and letters).
The second (2nd) complaint I have is that it give little to no coverage of the pronunciation. Which normally would be fine, but because this book is completely based on spoken chinese (as stated in the intro) I would have hoped that there would be something like guidelines on how to pronounce the letters.
Finnally, it does throw a lot of things at you all at once, but if you take your time, and practise for like a day after each lesson, and practice some more, and basically go through the book SLOWLY, you can learn a lot.
So if you by the book, I suggest getting something that would teach you chinese pronunciation, and, because this book focuses less on written chinese and more on spoken chinese, a guide to writing chinese as well.
All in all, this book could be better, but isn't bad.
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