Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction for travellers
Review: Before buying (or reviewing) a language instruction book, you should consider the purpose of the book. This book intends to give you some basic speaking ability in Chinese in a relatively short amount of time, to help you express yourself while traveling, shopping, eating, and doing other typical tourist activities. It does an excellent job of that. If you're looking for more than that, choose a book that better meets your needs.The book is divided into 24 lessons, with the suggestion you study each one for 10 minutes. That's just 4 hours of study, plus however much time you want to spend practicing. This won't make you fluent, won't teach you to read/write characters, and it won't really help you understand someone speaking Chinese to you, but it will give you the basic speaking skills it aims to provide. There are flash cards to cut out and practice with, and sticky labels to put on things around your house. The words are written in Pinyin, which is a romanization of Mandarin words based on their pronunciation. Pinyin pronunciation isn't obvious to English readers, so the book includes additional phonetic spelling. For example, it tells you the PinYin word 'jie' is pronounced 'jee-eh'. There are a number of exercises so you can practice what you've learned, which helps you remember. If you'd like to build a good foundation of common Chinese words and phrases with a minimal amount of study time, then I think you'll be happy with this book.
Rating:
Summary: traveller
Review: For the traveller this is a great, fairly easy way to learn a difficult language.
Rating: 
Summary: very good with a little bit of dedication
Review: I found a few translation mistakes, but most are corrected later on by giving the other correct definition (though you may want a dictionary to be sure which is which). There weren't too many though, and I'm sure most any foreign language book is bound to have a few. What I really loved about this book was that in addition to the pinyin, they also gave the pronunciation piece by piece the way it would really be written in English-it's the only book I've seen that's done that, and for that added help on the pronuciation (which you could very easily mess up using only the pinyin) I would recommend this book. But it's not only that: it offers most of the vocab you would NEED while in China, and though it doesn't have much to offer in the way of grammar, you can get by with only a little bit of confusion with the words and limited gramatical structure you pick up in the book. And just in case it doesn't mention it in the description: this is Mandarin Chinese: which is spoken in Beijing, and not the Cantonese which is spoken in Hong Kong.
Rating:
Summary: SHOCKINGLY AWESOME
Review: I teach from this book. It is awesome in all languages. Replete with pictures, fun stuff and good words, it is the ULTIMATE BEGGINNER BOOK. I love using it to teach and it can be worked with without teacher...
Rating:
Summary: Makes learning Chinese fun
Review: It takes a lot more than 10 minutes a day to learn Chinese, but this is a good place to start. Pictures, games, puzzles and stick-on labels make learning basic phrases fun. I got this book before I went to live in Beijing in 1994, and found it handy. I used it to supplement lessons from my private tutor. Some foreigners I worked with also had the book, and stuck the labels up all over their apartments.
Rating:
Summary: Makes learning Chinese fun
Review: It takes a lot more than 10 minutes a day to learn Chinese, but this is a good place to start. Pictures, games, puzzles and stick-on labels make learning basic phrases fun. I got this book before I went to live in Beijing in 1994, and found it handy. I used it to supplement lessons from my private tutor. Some foreigners I worked with also had the book, and stuck the labels up all over their apartments.
Rating:
Summary: Easy and motivating
Review: My boyfriend and I are going to be moving to China next year, and since he knows absolutely no Chinese I thought this book would be helpful. Now our whole house is labeled with stickers, and it is working. Its a pretty quick and easy way to learn, I just wish it had the charecters as well.
Rating:
Summary: quick way to learn common chinese
Review: My boyfriend and I are going to be moving to China next year, and since he knows absolutely no Chinese I thought this book would be helpful. Now our whole house is labeled with stickers, and it is working. Its a pretty quick and easy way to learn, I just wish it had the charecters as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat useful, but lacks audio
Review: The system is a pretty good one. There are lots of pictures, pages to help you practice saying and writing the words, etc. The idea of doing just a little bit each day is a good one. Unfortunately, there is no audio tape. Audio is always so important for pronounciation, but this is even more true with Chinese where tones are critical to the word's meaning. I would not recommend this book for that reason.
Rating: 
Summary: 2.5 on a scale of 1-5
Review: This book is basically a glorified list of vocabulary words. There are no conversations and very few sentences in the book. It doesn't teach much grammar, and seems to encourage using Chinese words with English sentence structures. If this were my only text, it would be very bad, but I'm finding it useful as a suplemetal text. The labels, pictures, and flash cards are all useful, but only when used in conjunction with a course or other book that actually teaches the language, not just the words.
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