Customer Reviews

Chinese Slanguage: A Fun Visual Guide to Mandarin Terms and Phrases

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

 

 

Mr. Ellis' book is the craft of a incredibly gifted individual!

Learning simple Mandarin terms, useful to anyone, has never been this much fun!

The visuals are extremely helpful in remembering the phrase needed, and I cannot think of an easier way to learn.

I'm looking forward to more books on other languages from Mike Ellis!

Well done!

Karen

I purchased this book after seeing Mike Ellis' webpage. The book is very informative and easy to use. For each word or phrase, the Mandarin pinyin, Chinese characters and the easy "slanguage" pronunciation are shown. Some sounds can be very intimidating, but this book makes it easy. This is the most fun I have ever had learning a language! If you are learning Mandarin, you MUST BUY THIS BOOK!!! Bonnie

I was in China for the month of July 2010 to teach conversational English to Chinese teachers who taught English at Middle School and High School. Since I spoke no Chinese I tried the book on them. They thought the book was laughable - only a few Chinesee words and phrases were understood.

This is a clever idea, and it would be nice if you could actually learn to speak languages this way, but unfortunately it doesn't work. You won't be understood if you learn this way unless you actually make the effort to learn the way Chinese speakers pronounced the vowels, consonants, and *tones*! If you're at all serious about learning Chinese, bite the bullet and learn pinyin and the at least some of the most frequent characters. I don't know if he learned from this particular book or not, but I once heard an American guy in a Chinese bookstore say, "Shay, shay!" (intoning it the way an American woman might say "Bye-bye" to a kid), and the clerks had no idea that he was trying to say "Xiè-xie" ('Thank you').