Customer Reviews

Chinese For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyles Paperback))

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you have no previous exposure to Chinese, this book/CD will make you FEEL like a Dummy! You are expected to repeat entire phrases and sentences from the start. It's better for a beginner who has already done some basic work in Chinese. However the book is wonderful for explaining Chinese culture, and the author definitely conveys her own love for China and the people and language. The cultural notes are fascinating and definitely more accessible for "dummies" than the audio section. If you are a beginner looking for a "step 2" program the CD is a great challenge and introduces a lot of new vocabulary.

This book suffers from two problems. One is that it throws readers directly into conversation and overwhelms them. I used the book to pick up a few cultural niceties, but my Chinese friends laughed at my failure to use the correct tones. The other problem is that it is shoehorned into the Dummies framework of organizing books rather than trying to absolute novices the basics first. This book has good appendixes and other reference material. It would be a great second book after you have mastered another approach of learning basic Chinese. I quickly ditched this approach, and bought the Pimsleur series.

I cannot recommend this book to anybody who does not already have a basic knowledge of Chinese. If you intend to learn some Chinese as a beginner, please avoid this [...] and seek different literary introductions.
All this book does, is teaching you sentences and phrases and what they mean.

It would tell you, how to tell a person, that you are not Chinese:

W'ô bú shì zhö'ng guó rén. (I can't do all phonetics correctly)
I am not Chinese.

That's all it does. It would have been so easy, to make this a helpful exercise by pointing out what you were literally saying, namely:

I not be middle-land-man.

Concealing this fact, this book almost deliberately disables you from putting sentences together yourself because it won't tell you how to!

Again: It is consisting only of sentences and phrases that one must learn by heart. Maybe that's the Dummie's way, but - unless you are a chimp - I don't think anybody would be dull enough to learn an entire language this way.

DO NOT BUY if you are really interested in learning Chinese as a beginner.

I needed a good book on Chinese language to prepare for my fiance coming next month from Shanghai. I had already bought several books on Chinese language and each had different approaches to laying out the land of a somewhat difficult language.
When I received Chinese for Dummies, I skimmed through the varius chapters and saw that the format used in the book, made it easier to understand the language and the "chinese mind" that I beleive the other books lacked in scope.
I ended up using the chapters as a template for lesson plans, not only for myself, but for teaching my fiance English.
The additional CD made it easier by "hearing" the tonal structure
of the Chinese, something the other books disappointedly lacked.
I highly recommend this book.

This book is a great intro into the form of the chinese language. The suplementary CD includes about 30 conversations which you can follow along in different sections of the book and allows you to practice along with it by splitting up the conversation and allowing you to repeat a few words at a time. It also helps with pronoucing the four tones on the first few tracks which is very useful. The book itself is organized very well and has mini chinese-english and english-chinese dictionaries in the back for the most used words. Overall, an excellent buy.

The title of the book is misleading, it expects you to have some basic knowledge of the language. If you don't know anything about Chinese when you start reading it, you will be completely lost. If you do know the basics of the language, this book will teach you very little vocabulary and grammar (in my case it didn't teach me anything I didn't learned from Pimsleur). The teaching method used by this book is really inefficient.

The audio is terribly slow, I don't have any other Chinese course that have such a slow audio speed; it is nowhere near real conversational speed and it takes forever to listen to a whole lesson.

There are plenty of products out there that are better than this one, don't waste your money on this book. Pimsleur/Assimil are way better. The New Practical Chinese Reader costs about the same price and will teach you way more than this book does.

Chinese for Dummies is, in no way, a book for beginners. It's a book for people who have studied Mandarin for 20 years and just haven't gotten it yet. It's for people who really just don't get it... but even those people probably won't be aided by this book.

What I know for sure is that beginners will be lost. This is not a teaching tool, it is a reinforcement tool, best used to supplant prior exposure to Mandarin Chinese.

Don't buy this book expecting to LEARN chinese. For that, go with Rosetta Stone or Pimsleaur. But if you are looking to brush up on your Mandarin in a quick and (somewhat) easy way, this book might be for you.

This is a very good reference book for learning spoken Mandarin. As stated in the Introduction, this is not a book intended to be read from cover to cover. Instead, it's written for browsing. I agree with some other reviewers that this book isn't exactly a basic Dummies book. Some previous Chinese language experience before reading this book makes more sense. The information in this book is still very useful though. One problem I have with this book is that the type is small. Sometimes it's hard to see the tone marks without wearing reading glasses. A larger font would make the transliterated text easier to read. Also, this book does not have any information about reading Chinese characters. I think this book is worth the low price as a reference book, but you'll still need other references.

The book has a lot of material that you don't know how to pronouced because is not included in the cd and based on a language where tone is essential because can change the meaning complete different is not good at all.

Chinese for Dummies by Wendy Abraham,

ISBN 978-0471788973

Chinese for Dummies,

by Wendy Abraham

ISBN 978-0471788973

[...]
This is the worst book in the entire Chinese language field.

There is not a single Chinese character in this book or a single Pinyin word/syllable in it. This books holds the ridiculous position that a learner does not need to study tone.

This is without a doubt the absolute worst book written on learning Chinese.

Stupid is what stupid writes. This is more like a novel with occasional Pinyin thrown in. There are many errors in Pinyin word construction, errors in tone markers and errors in the English writing!!!!

"Chinese" is a written language, i.e. the characters. There is not one Chinese character in the book.

Although this may seem ideal to the initiate learner, if the Chinese characters were not necessary to learn the language, 1.5 billion Chinese would not have learned them.

This book makes no attempt to demonstrate homophones and the representative characters that they phonate. The worst part of this book are the "Talking the Talk" sections. Pinyin stacked on top of a new "dummy phonetic" code and English on the bottom is just too confusing to sort out. With many examples the Pinyin, "Dummy phonetic" and English are all on the same line. Tables would have solved this. And why squeeze it into a narrow column and waste half the page??

And what is this "dummy phonetic" code. The whole idea of Pinyin was to construct a phonetic code to represent the Roman/English alphabet. Most letters and letter combinations are pronounced the same. Why create a whole new phonetic system?? So now there is IPA, Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles and Dummy Pinyin Code. Why not just point out the ones that are different rather than filling this book with a new phonetic system. Then there is the issue of the joined Pinyin words and the separated "dummy phonetic' words.

There is in fact very little Chinese learning in this book.

The attempts at humour are lame and irritating, offensive really. There is too much effort to make things funny and they just come over as stupid.

The CD is horribly indexed, like how hard is it to create a useful file name?

Then there is the translations. They do not follow grammatical rules and many take great liberty at rearranging word order when it is not necessary.

Ultimately this is a phrase book with a very mediocre CD.

And $31.99? I could have bought 3 useful book for that price.

And what is with these "Words to Know" with black backgrounds??? It is hard to read!!!

This is a shameful effort and a deception. What a wast of money.