Chinese in 10 Minutes a Day

This book makes learning fun. It has an interactive cd that downloads quickly, it also has flash cards and item names to place on the item so that you can see it daily. My son and i each got a book. He is in Taiwan now teaching English and we are able to practice Mandarin Chinese in the evening. It's great when you can use the book this way, only 10 minutes a day, lots of review and learning becomes fun.

not enough said about this book, it takes you from basics to conversation.

This was a good book to start a basic vocab and concept of what would later be studied in the Chinese language. I use this book very frequently to start learning a new language and, the only thing that would be missing would be an audio guide to the book. Pronunciation in Chinese is very essential to the word and understanding of the language.

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.

It takes a lot more than 10 minutes a day to learn Chinese, but this is a good place to start. Pictures, games, puzzles and stick-on labels make learning basic phrases fun. I got this book before I went to live in Beijing in 1994, and found it handy. I used it to supplement lessons from my private tutor. Some foreigners I worked with also had the book, and stuck the labels up all over their apartments.