Anna Mei Banfa!: A Short Beginners' Novel Entirely in Chinese: Simplified Chinese / Pinyin Version (Chinese Edition)

I bought this book a while ago. I'm an intermediate beginner in my level of Chinese. I understand a lot of basic words and verbs, as well as very basic grammar structures. I bought this book to improve my reading.Here is my process when reading this book.First I read chapter 1 in pinyin, looking up all the words in the glossary in the back that I didn't know. I found the words easily 90 percent of the time, the other 10 percent I struggled to find the word in the glossary for whatever reason. For those words I used google translate. This helped me get the gist of the story. I read the pinyin aloud to practice fluency.Then, I began methodically at page one, and underlined all the characters I didn't already know. I put those unknown words/characters into my flashcard app, and practiced recognizing the all the characters. Once I felt confident with the characters on the page, I read the page silently aloud using only the characters. I created new flashcard decks for each page. Page 4 was exciting because there were only 4 words I didn't know.After that, I practiced copying paragraphs into my Chinese journal. For every character I didn't know, I looked up stroke order and practiced it on a separate piece of paper until I felt it looked better. If the paragraph I copied was sloppy, I just wrote it again to make it look more beautiful. After doing this for a while, I got a much better and easier feel for the way in which characters are written, and now I can look at most characters and guess their stroke order. I always double check to make sure I got it right. Soon, common characters like 家 jiā were second nature to write.Finally, I tried summarizing the story aloud using the words and structures I had learned. I tried summarizing the story in my journal using pinyin and characters. This helped me synthesize the information.If anyone is a self study preferred learner, this was a good process for me.PROS:- The book repeats characters often, and the sentence structures are practiced multiple times in multiple contexts, which is great for a beginner.- Sometimes you'll get a page which doesn't introduce too many new characters, which was good for review.- The pinyin is located on the back of the page so you can test your knowledge of the characters.- The glossary is mostly good.- It's a physical book, great for paper and pencil learners like meCONS:- There are some mistakes. For example, I bought this book in simplified chinese, but there were some traditional characters, which could lead to confusion.- Some pinyin tones are wrong- Some characters are wrong. For example, the word for summer: 夏天 xiàtiān was written in the book as: 天天 day dayOverall, I recommend it to an advanced beginner, or someone who has the patience to deal with errors.

Originally I was able to speak some Chinese, but decided to start learning how to read it. My goal is to learn how to read a Chinese newspaper. For learning characters I have been using memrise.com on my computer, which was really good, but it was time to start trying to read text in context. At this point I have made it almost to the end of the memrise HSK 3 level lessons. For reading this is one of the books I got for practice and has turned out to be my favorite so far!I love this book because it has a great format for learning Chinese. On the back of each page of simplified Chinese text is the same text in pinyin (how it is pronounced). At the end of the book is a dictionary with all the words sorted by the Pinyin (so they are easy to look up). The paragraph structure on each page is also really helpful when trying to associate the Chinese characters with their pinyin. The story is well written and kind of fun. I like the "on the back format" over the "pinyin on the side format" because I am not tempted to cheat and look up the pinyin when I don't have to.For me, this book has been and awesome experience and is just what I wanted! I am hoping to find other books that use this format, as it is very helpful.

Anna Meibanfa is a great book for the Advanced Beginner of Chinese (as a Foreign Language) who wants to make prgres in reading Chinese. Since teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language is a new field, it is hard to find appropriate texts for the learner of Chinese outside of China. For example, by putting the Hanyu Pinyin (standard phonetic for learning Chinese) on the back of the page, Terry has gently forced the reader to read Chinese without any help. Yet, the student may turn over the page at anytime and see the pronunciation of each Chinese character. The text is in Simplified Chinese characters, which is great for those who previously only recognized Tradational Chinese characters. In addition, there is a glossary at the back of the book for the reader to refer to at any time. I highly recommend this book as a great way to gain confidence in learning Chinese. Thank you, Terry.

I have read through about half this book now. I have taken two semesters of Mandarin at my college so i haven't had trouble with any of the grammar thus far, but it has used a good amount of vocabulary i haven't been exposed to. It does repeat the vocabulary a lot, which is good to help remember it. I enjoy the story from what i have read, but it would be compared to reading somewhere around a 3rd grade English book so dont feel like a fluent Mandarin speaker after reading the book heh heh. Its a great book for beginning Mandarin learners and i would recommend it to others. Just wish i could find the others in this series.

It was shipped to me on time and in perfect condition. I could not ask for anything better than that. The book is good for basic chinese level. The chinese in the front with pinyin at the back fo the page makes it easier for readers to look up the pronouncation quickly. I would have preferred if there were less english words as the whole purpose was to learn more chinese. Thanks.

I enjoyed reading this short novel by Terry Waltz. I read the Chinese edition as a practice for my Mandarin, and it was an easy read. Anna lives in New York but is unhappy with her family. She gets the opportunity to spend a few months in Taiwan, as she is learning Mandarin at school, and the experience is an eye opener for her. She comes back to the US richer and more settled.

It's an interesting story and I'm glad they had the pinyin on the other page just in case I didn't know how to read a character. The bad part is some of the pinyin were wrong and it felt a little childish and they would rewrite the sentence just in a different way that basically meant the same thing. Was expecting something a little more challenging and natural.

Great to consolidate very basic Chinese characters with Pinyin on the reverse side of the page to help with fluidity.

Excellent reading material for someone who has mastered a good level of vocabulary and is interested in using it.

Excellent book, would definitely recommend it.

La idea de tener un libro con una historia para mantener y mejorar el nivel del aprendizaje del chino es valiosa, y ademas al poner la escritura en pinyin en la pagina siguiente ayuda bastante. El unico inconveniente que le encuentro es el tema de la historieta que cuentan , que es un bastante pueril, quiza pensado con mentalidad americana, y con algunas frases propias de la China de Taiwan. Se podia haber aprovechado para contar una historia juvenil de mayor nivel literario.

What was very, very good in that book were the words at the end of the book, translating the pinyin with tone marks into English as well as providing the Chinese characters. This was the most helpful thing for me.I also liked the story. It is a helpful book in learning everyday use of Chinese words.I also liked that the fact that one page was in Chinese characters but also on another page the pinyin (which was much easier to translate than the characters)