asia

Before buying (or reviewing) a language instruction book, you should consider the purpose of the book. This book intends to give you some basic speaking ability in Chinese in a relatively short amount of time, to help you express yourself while traveling, shopping, eating, and doing other typical tourist activities. It does an excellent job of that. If you're looking for more than that, choose a book that better meets your needs.

The book is divided into 24 lessons, with the suggestion you study each one for 10 minutes. That's just 4 hours of study, plus however much time you want to spend practicing. This won't make you fluent, won't teach you to read/write characters, and it won't really help you understand someone speaking Chinese to you, but it will give you the basic speaking skills it aims to provide.

There are flash cards to cut out and practice with, and sticky labels to put on things around your house. The words are written in Pinyin, which is a romanization of Mandarin words based on their pronunciation. Pinyin pronunciation isn't obvious to English readers, so the book includes additional phonetic spelling. For example, it tells you the PinYin word 'jie' is pronounced 'jee-eh'.

There are a number of exercises so you can practice what you've learned, which helps you remember.

If you'd like to build a good foundation of common Chinese words and phrases with a minimal amount of study time, then I think you'll be happy with this book.

This book is basically a glorified list of vocabulary words. There are no conversations and very few sentences in the book. It doesn't teach much grammar, and seems to encourage using Chinese words with English sentence structures. If this were my only text, it would be very bad, but I'm finding it useful as a suplemetal text. The labels, pictures, and flash cards are all useful, but only when used in conjunction with a course or other book that actually teaches the language, not just the words.

My boyfriend and I are going to be moving to China next year, and since he knows absolutely no Chinese I thought this book would be helpful. Now our whole house is labeled with stickers, and it is working. Its a pretty quick and easy way to learn, I just wish it had the charecters as well.