Mandarin Chinese the Easy Way with Audio CD [With CD]

by Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu Ph.D.

Book Overview

Titles in Barron's Easy Way series are self-teaching manuals that cover a wide range of subjects and skills. Among them are several language-learning books for beginners. This second edition of Mandarin Chinese the Easy Way comes with an audio compact disc that supplements the book, providing pronunciation help and listening comprehension material in the form of spoken dialogues. This book-and-CD combination introduces basic sentence patterns and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764193694
• ISBN13: 9780764193699
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Barrons Educational Series
• Length: 361 Pages
• Weight: 1.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.9" x 10.7"

Customer Reviews

Great learning tool!

I didn't expect to get so much out of such a compact, inexpensive tool, but it is great. The explanations and exercises are very clear and well concieved. I love the appendices with Chinese characters and the fact that you can use the CD and book without learning the characters if you would rather do that. We had been using an all-audio program by Pimsleur, and this was a great addition -- way exceded expectations.

Mandarin conversations with many vocabulary to learn

I got to the eighth chapter and realized that after listening to the CD conversations and reading the the lessons in each chapter, that there were fifty-three words to learn, but not enough lessons to fully learn them. I wish there were more lessons. But I am a teacher, so I wrote my own sentences with the vocabulary and searched online for a site that could help me correct my sentences. I wish they had provided more practice with the vocabulary or at least mentioned a website where one could find more practice with the vocabulary. Overall, though, I do like the format of the book and the premise that one must learn a new language through conversation and then practice of the words and grammar through lessons. Each chapter ends with a summary of the skills learned, which was helpful for review. I added tabs with the titles of each chapter, so I could easily find them for review. I can tell you that learning Mandarin is made easier with this conversational workbook, but I really would like it if more practice was included in each chapter. But for the price, it's a pretty good deal.

Great book for a private tutor

I use this book with my tutor, a native Mandarin speaker, and it works great. ^_^