Teach Yourself Chinese

I am a student of multiple languages and have recently purchased this book. Now there are divided opinions about the "teach yourself (insert language)" series of books. Well, I like some of them, especially this one. One must realize that each of these books is written by a different person and that the entire serires is not written by the same people. This particuliar book is invaluable to me in my study of chinese. The one bit of advice I have is this: if you are not good at picking up foreign pronunciation, especially non enlgish/non romance languages, then this is not for you. THis book has a very small section on pronunciation so this is your book only f you can grasp the sound of Chinese easily. OVerall, I REALLY reccomend this bok for the beginnin Mandarin student.

I've read some other complains about how this book "is too tough for beginners," but to me it's totally the wrong attitude to take when learning a language.. i've learned three other languages now, and it's not that i'm good at languages-- i've just found better ways of learning. For one, you have to get make sure to get ridiculous amounts of exposure to whatever language you are trying to learn. To me, if someone complains that there's too much to learn, well, that's what they signed on for: if you want to learn a whole new language, you should be prepared to be immersed in it beyond belief, and trust that your mind will do what it takes to make sense of your environment. Beginners especially need to kick themselves in the pants, otherwise you are wasting your time. This book does cram a lot of the information into the later chapters (the beginning chapters are basic, actually). When you think about it, it means that you are getting your money's worth. If a chapter is too much, take a couple more days on it. But the alternative is buying another, easier book that, in the end, cheats you out of your money, because you pay the same / higher price, thinking that "it's more your level" when in fact they just give you less info per page. The trick is allowing yourself access to a lot of information, so that you can attack it at your own pace. I enrolled at a the "Learn Chinese" course at Zhejiang Da Xue, China's third largest university, but found that the money I had paid (a full semester's worth) would go to waste; the end of the course text book was still just focused on how to say "I will eat food". I expected that after six months at this program, I'd be able to say something a little more complex than that. But it was such a baby course that focused so much on characters, that progression into the meat of the language became a real issue. This book is for those people who want to speak chinese. Now, I looked all over the place IN CHINA, and I bought many many books. All were either too character focused (thus containing too few pages on how to speak chinese), or "Intensive Speaking" books that were really thin (I suspect because those books were designed for short-stay visitors to China), which frustratingly enough, stopped only a little farther at "I will eat food tomorrow". This book was a godsend. I had it shipped from the US to China, cause it seemed like exactly what I needed: a book that teaches spoken chinese, finally. I was so impressed with it, I vowed to write Ms. Scurfield a rave review, but I was too busy speaking chinese I never got around to it until now. Now characters are important, but to me its a more leveraged use of time to focus on speaking while in China, because one can always learn characters with flash cards. It's a completely different game to learn the spoken language, than it is to memorize characters, but all of the other books I encountered often confused the two. Using her book, I learned Chinese in a lit

I had this book before I started taking college Chinese and it was too big a bite to chew. Ten credit hours and two trips to China later it excellently serves as a supplementary classroom material. This book is well organized. Chapter one starts out with standard, Hello, How are you? My name is so and so. I come from so and so. Then it progresses to telling more about yourself and your family, ordering food (very important when you travel to China.), making hotel reservation, ... etc. This book is the best overall. That means, there are better books on Chiness reading out there if you are concentrated solely on reading. (Try John DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Reader) If you want an absolute beginner then try Berlitz's.

In preparing to go to China, this book was recommended by two different tutors - one from China (and his wife) and one from Malaysia. It is sure to give you a very strong foundation in the language. Make sure you get the version that comes with the tapes.

I liked this book very much. The basics of Chinese sentence structure and grammar are explained very clearly and in a very illustrative way. In many places the author comments and explains about the "balance" of the sentence - which is very important in speaking fluent Chinese. In fact, I owe much of my understanding and quicker learning of the language to this book. The vocabulary is very useful, although in some chapters the number of new words is a little big. The tapes are OK but nothing beats a native speaker to practice on. One major fault in my opinion is the use of simplified characters. It's true that they are the ones that are used in China today, but not in Taiwan and not in Hong Kong. It is easier to study the simplefied after having learned the tradional ones than vice versa