Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139340 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08
• Original language: Chinese, English
• Binding: Paperback
• 147 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent for learning Mandarin at home
This book is excellently laid out. Every chapter has new vocabulary, speech patterns, additional vocab, listening practice, dialogues and exercises. It even has a section to practice writing chinese words with stroke order included. As someone who knew absolutely no mandarin before buying this book, I found it tremendously helpful and is paced very well. I really am learning mandarin step-by-step using this book!

However, there is one issue that's preventing me from giving this a rating of 5 stars. Even though this book comes with 2 audio CDs, there is only one track on each CD, so if you wish only to listen to new vocab of Lesson 4, when you play the CD, you won't get to it unless you listen to lessons 1-3 first. They really should have put in the effort of separating out all the lessons, sections and dialogues as separate tracks to make it easier for students to play back and repeat. Hopefully if enough people tell them of this issue then they will address this for all future volumes in this series.

hen hao
I agree with the reviewer ahead of me. This would absolutely be a 5 star product if it wasn't for the problems with the CDs. A little time with the CDs and my ipod mean that I now have each chapter saved as a separate file, but they really should be like that already.
The book itself is excellent, introducing both characters and pinyin (Chinese written with the Roman alphabet) at a steady, but achievable pace. It helps to have a teacher to motivate you, and I'm not sure how I'd cope without the additional guidance that I've received, but this book has been an excellent guide to the language. I'm eagerly awaiting volume 2.

SOAS book of choice
This really is a great series of books for those who are serious about learning Chinese and you'll be hard pushed to find any better. There are 4 books in the series, so when you are finished with chapter 10 in Volume 1, chapter 11 will be there waiting for you in Volume 2.;)

My favourite thing about this book is the generous amount of examples in the speech patterns section, which prove extremely useful when it comes to learning Chinese grammar.

If you have a serious problem with the CD's, you should contact the publisher as they do send out copies with more tracks on upon request. The speaking speed is great for the beginner and you really do need to listen to those 2 CD's a lot in preperation for Volume 2, which is much faster. Dont neglect the CD's!