Basic Chinese - Reading & Writing Textbook: An Introduction to Written Chinese for Beginners (6+ hours of Audio Included)

Good

With a Chinese 101 course under my belt taken a few years before, I embarked on this book to review the characters my class had covered and to learn new characters. I really enjoyed working my way through the book and looked forward to my sessions with it. It's a great idea to only introduce six new characters at a time; they were much easier to remember than the 20 or so I'd encountered at once in my earlier study. I also found the explanations of the characters helpful.The challenges with the book came with (1) the need to find grammar explanations in the Speaking & Listening companion text, which has a much larger Chinese vocabulary (only in Pinyin), and (2) the lack of Pinyin transcriptions and English translations of the readings. Still, because this Reading & Writing book inspired me to return to a study of Chinese (on my own), I'm giving it five stars. Now as I have moved on to more advanced books, I keep this one at hand and refer back to it.

This series of basic mandarin ( 3 books ) are one of the best books ( Chinese language ) I have bought so far, whether in school or self taught it's the bestif you are looking for a book to learn Chinese, this is it. The 3 series are, pronunciation, reading and writing, and the text book. The pronunciation book is the first one you should start with, in case you can't afford all three. 🙂

None

Lake

Excellent book. Very helpful for a novice.

My only quibble is that it refers to the companion 'talking' book rather more than you would expect from the cover blurb.