Teach Yourself Chinese Complete Course

Rating:
Summary: HIGHLY recommended for beginners and current students
Review: As a student of the Chinese language at a major American university I have reviewed several different Chinese language courses, and found none more concise, academic, or effective than Ms. Scurfield's Teach Yourself course. Contrary to that portrayed in another posted review of this book, the tapes are an excellent resource: the Mandarin spoken is very standard, the pronunciations are clear and precise, and the lessons are generally very thorough and apply directly to the lessons in the book. I began my Chinese studies with this book, and merely using the tapes from this course alone, PhD students in the Chinese department at the university said my pronunciation sounded almost like that of a native speaker. Having looked at the book they agreed that the course is easy to understand and concise, yet complete and intelligent. With some time and effort I believe one can develop a strong foundation in Mandarin Chinese through this course alone. I also highly recommended it for beginning high school and university Chinese language students as a supplementary resource.

Rating:
Summary: A good beginning book
Review: I like this textbook for the most part, although the tapes have a couple of problems for absolute beginners who have no Chinese friends they can go to for help. The 1st tape goes into detail with Chinese sounds, but there is no way of knowing which sound corresponds to which letter in pinyin. This is maddening, since you can't easily figure out how to pronoune written words. There is some tone practice, which is much clearer. The best part about the tapes is that the speakers start out slowly, and speed up to normal by the end of the 2 hours of lessons. It really helps you ease into rapid-fire (i.e., normal) Chinese. I'm a college foreign language teacher by trade, and I have to say that I like the simple, clear grammatical explanations (and believe me, I've seen some real disasters). Chinese grammar isn't too complex, but it's very different from English; this text presents grammar in a logical manner, and incorporates the grammar covered into that chapter's dialogue. The setup is well thought out, and the vocabulary is useful. Although no text can replace a live teacher, this book is a good way to start with Chinese, especially if you have no one to take lessons from.

Rating:
Summary: A very good book for beginners
Review: I liked this book very much. The basics of Chinese sentence structure and grammar are explained very clearly and in a very illustrative way. In many places the author comments and explains about the "balance" of the sentence - which is very important in speaking fluent Chinese. In fact, I owe much of my understanding and quicker learning of the language to this book. The vocabulary is very useful, although in some chapters the number of new words is a little big. The tapes are OK but nothing beats a native speaker to practice on. One major fault in my opinion is the use of simplified characters. It's true that they are the ones that are used in China today, but not in Taiwan and not in Hong Kong. It is easier to study the simplefied after having learned the tradional ones than vice versa

Rating:
Summary: BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU WANT TO LEARN CHINESE!!!!!
Review: People keep complaining about how "it's too tough for beginners" but to me it's totally the wrong attitude to take when learning a language.. i've learned three other languages now, and it's not that i'm good at languages-- i've just figured out HOW to learn languages.

You gotta expose yourself to lots of the language, first of all. If someone complains that there's too much to learn, well, that's what you signed on for: if you want to learn a WHOLE new language, you should be prepared for a whole lot of stuff. Beginners especially need to kick themselves in the pants, otherwise you are WASTING your time. This book just puts a lot of the information into the later chapters (the beginning chapters are basic, actually). Some people say "it's too much" but when you think about it, YOU ARE GETTING YOUR MONEY'S WORTH. If a chapter is too much, take a couple more days on it. But the alternative is buying another, easier book that, in the end, cheats you out of your money, because you pay the same / higher price, thinking that "it's more your level" when in fact they just give you less info to per page. The trick is allowing yourself access to a lot of information, so that you can attack it at your own pace.

I enrolled at a the "Learn Chinese" course at Zhezhiang DaXue, China's third largest university, but found that the money I had paid for A FULL SEMESTER would go to waste; the end of the text book was still on how to say "I will eat food". I expected that after SIX months at this program, i'd be able to say things a little more complex than that. But it was such a baby course that focused so much on characters, that progression into the meat of the language became a real issue.

This book is for those people who want to SPEAK chinese. Now, I looked all over the place IN CHINA, and I bought many many books. All were either too character focused (this moving only a little forward in terms of speaking), or "Intensive Speaking" books that were really thin and stopped only a little farther at "I will eat food tomorrow".

This book was a godsend. I had it shipped from the US to China, cause it seemed like exactly what I needed: a book that teaches spoken chinese, finally. I was so impressed with it, I vowed to write Ms. Scurfield a rave review, but I was too busy speaking chinese I never got around to it until now.

Now characters are important, but not as important / useful in or outside of China. You can always learn characters with flash cards, it's a TOTALLY different game then learning a spoken language, but most books often confuse the two.

Using her book, I learned chinese in like TWO MONTHS. Granted, I studied it like 20 hours a week for those two months, and I practiced it, but still, that is MUCH more than I can say about the usefulness of those other books.

Her book is INCREDIBLY WELL THOUGHT-OUT and ORGANIZED. The lady drips with a commitment to teaching the reader chinese, it's in the way she writes and presents the information.

Now keep in mind, I was living in a dorm building with many other english speakers who were trying to learn chinese, and they too had many books, but I was the envy of all.

And the price is ridiculously cheap, considering you get all that REAL instruction, and TWO TAPES, which are a must have.

Of course, the work is on you to speak, and study a little, but with other books even if you are diligent, they will limit you with their all too academic focus on the Chinese language.

Elizabeth Scurfield rocks, and she should be recieving much more acclaim then she does.