Beyond the Basics : Communicative Chinese for Intermediate/Advanced Learners (2 Cassettes)

Rating:
Summary: This book needs lots of improvement!
Review: I've tried this book/cassettes and it's not a bad book, but it's just needs some improvement. First, it needs to be in PINYIN! All the texts are in chinese characters and not pinyin. Secondly, translation paralleling the text would be extremely helpful. It has none! Thirdly, the people who speak on the tapes are not trained in "play-acting". They just read but do not have a realistic dialogue between 2 Chinese. Better and clearer voices are needed to speak in the recording. I understand that the purpose of "intermediate/advance" book is for the student to look up words/vocabularies by themselves but since it is for self-study purpose it is so extremely time-consuming to do it by one-self.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but not enough information and bad grammar.
Review: This can be helpful if used in a classroom setting, but it suffers from like most Chinese textbooks, giving incorrect grammatical explanations. In the texts it doesn't define proper names, which can be difficult because most intermediate or advanced students would not know names like Zhao Ziyang. The sections on grammar are worthless, and there should be more examples in the sentence pattern area. Still, it can be used somewhat effectively if you have a skilled teacher.