Customer Reviews

Chinese Primer: The Pinyin (v. 1-3)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As has been stated before, anyone who wants to use the Chinese series books should get at least three -
1. Bluish color, with lessons (mostly dialogues) in pinyin and English
2. Red book, with exercises and grammar notes for the first blue one
3. Yellow book, for character practice.

There is also a green book that has all the lessons from the blue book translated into traditional and simplified characters, which could have been useful to me, if I had only known of its existance...

The three books set comes in two versions, one in pinyin, and
one in GR, here's the explanation:

Pinyin is the standard romanization of Chinese in the People's Republic of China, so native speakers should be familiar with it more - important if you want to take a tutor.

Gr is a kind of romanization that is apparently very popular for teaching to foreigners. Most Chinese people are not used to it, however. So I guess it's better for professional teachers.

Bottom line, ask your tutor/teacher which version they recommend.
If you're not sure, I'd recommend the pinyin - it worked for me so far.

I've been using first three for about 4 months, and I'm already able to use Chinese in simple conversations. Mind you, you need to put a some time and effort and a lot of patience every day for this to work. The people who wrote the book recommended using the Gr set, but I found the pinyin much easier. Just stick to the instructions inside, don't rush things, and follow the yellow brick road!!

This set is not merely the blue book, but instead all but the green book (dialog text in Chinese characters). That fact is plainly stated in the description itself. Please keep this in mind when reading the other reviews. As for my opinion of the set, I certainly think this is one (three?) of the better Chinese textbooks available, and was what I used when I was a Chinese major at the introductory level.

This book is a fairly all-inclusive 'primer' on Chinese, set into conversation format. No formal lessons are provided, nor is an English or character translation. This book is of little use to any amateur Chinese student without the other three 'Chinese Primer' books.

I'm an English teacher in Taiwan and I've found the full four-book set to be the best Chinese course available anywhere. Unfortunately, this book alone is probably just a waste of time and money.