Complete Mandarin Chinese: The Basics

by Living Language and Janet Lai

Book Overview

This Mandarin Chinese Learner's Dictionary is available alone or as part of the Complete Chinese course package which also includes a CD with 3 hours of recordings, a coursebook with 40 lessons, and a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400024250
• ISBN13: 9781400024254
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Living Language
• Length: 347 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

If you know how to use it

I purchased this book/cd set at a local bookstore, hoping it would teach me some basic Chinese. And I was surprised! If you are a good independent learner, than this book should be great. It is very inexpensive (you might as well just forget the cd if you already can master Chinese sounds), and it covers all the basics, including a few useful characters. WARNING: If you have trouble with memorization, this book may not be for you. BUT: It is like Pimsleur because it gives you words, and then puts them into phrases. Example: zao morning an good zaoan good morning! What I like to do is make flash cards of each word in a coversation, and then after I have learned them, review the conversation.

Great intro, but.....

This set provides a great introduction to Mandarin. This otherwise fine intro does have one large problem with it though....in the beginning chapters, the words and phrases are repeated in a different order than as they appear in the book. Because some of the spellings look similar, it is not possible to discern which word you're actually trying to repeat. This is a pretty sloppy error and should have been spotted.