Customer Reviews

Intensive Spoken Chinese (Mandarin Chinese Edition)

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Hi. I have never written a review for any item ever before online, but i am totally compelled to write one for this book. I am originally from NY, but i have been living in China on and off for 4.5 years. I now speak and read fluent Mandarin, but did not speak a word before i started traveling there. I run a small office in Shenzhen, China for my USA company. Although I studied for a short time in a school in Shanghai, I am basically self taught. This book is the best tool I ever had (the lonely planet guide to Mandarin Chinese is a very close second) This book takes you step by step through very basic phrases that you can actually go outside (to the chinese food take-out store if you're not in China!) and try out. Its great because it provides each phrase in Chinese charactres, Pinyin (Romanized Chinese), translated English, and along with a "V" "N" etc. to indicate the Verb, Noun, or other part of speech. It also then gives you vocabulary, so that you can use that phrase you just learned and subsitute in all different new words. (i.e. I like chocolate, I like cherries, I like fruit). Really, i can't recommend this book enough. The only downfall is although there is actually an accompanying tape recording...it's almost impossible to find in the market.

I got this book in Beijing at the start of a 2 year stint in China. It found it's way to a drawer and quickly became forgotten amid my new and exciting life. Several months later, when I re-discovered it, I kicked myself for not having used it earlier. It starts from the very beginning and doesn't require the reader to be able to read Chinese characters. However, for the student who wants to go the extra mile, the Chinese characters are included. That's also good for further down the road when a student begins to learn the characters, they can use this book as a reference to learn how to write and read already familar words and phrases. The topics are very useful and the dictionary in the back consisting of all words used in the book is very handy. For the serious student, I also recommend the companion books "The Most Common Chinese Radicals" and "Rapid Literacy in Chinese", although they won't be needed until after this book is completed.

I highly recommend this book in particular, as well as the other two books of this series. My most recent purchase of this book came with an accompanying CD, so don't buy the separate CDs for this book until you see whether your copy includes the CD.

I've studied Chinese in a classroom setting twice in my life, initially in 1984 using the old John DeFrancis books in a situation where students were paired one-on-one with native Beijing speakers, and more recently starting in 2008 in a community college setting. In the interim I collected much of the available training material on how to learn both simplified and traditional written Chinese and the most common spoken Chinese dialect. Much of this material was purchased in the primary bookstore in Beijing that caters to teaching Chinese to foreigners, and was not readily available in the US. More recently, I've used the Cheng & Tsui Integrated Chinese series, both edition 2 and edition 3, in my community college studies. I've also downloaded the US Foreign Service Intitute training materials for diplomats, and purchased both online coursework and computer-aided interactive instruction materials. And I subscribe to about a dozen mainland Chinese TV channels (by satellite) to maintain and/or recover fluency.

Of all the books, tapes, CDs, PDFs and courseware I've bought and studied, this series stands out as the best way to start learning basic Chinese, both written (simplified form only) and spoken (the dialects most commonly used on Taiwan, mainland China, and Singapore). It teaches a large modern vocabulary and set of idioms that are immediately usable in those countries or when meeting most Chinese anywhere.

This book is the first of a 3-book series created at the Beijing Language and Culture University to teach Chinese to adult foreigners. Unlike the approaches which attempt to teach both spoken and written Chinese simultaneously, which works well for languages with a phonetic written structure but not well for Chinese, this series teaches Chinese grammar and word forms and the most common spoken dialects (both Mandarin, used on Taiwan, and the very similar Putonghua, the Beijing dialect now used nationwide on the mainland) first (this book), while leaving the separable task of learning to read and write the non-phonetic Chinese characters for later.

This first book presents Chinese primarily through Pinyin, the phonetic romanization of Mandarin and Putonghua. (Pinyin is used in mainland China primarily for teaching young children and foreigners.) This first book also exposes students to the corresponding Chinese characters (simplified Hanzi), but does not mandate or emphasize that they be learned at this time. The emphasis of this first book is 1) learning the tonal structure of Mandarin/putonghua syllables, words and sentences; 2) learning a very large vocabulary of spoken words, many of which are two to four syllables, grouped into conceptually related sets of words; and 3) learning Chinese grammar. In these aspects, the first book (being reviewed here) is similar to most other Chinese texts, except that it teaches many more words, emphasizing substitution drills to lock them into memory, while avoiding the distraction of simultaneously rote-memorizing the complex structure of the corresponding non-phonetic characters. (The vocabulary of this book also tends to be more up-to-date than that of other basic training materials.)

When initially published, this first book had a pair of separately-purchasable audio tapes that provided examples of proper tonal pronunciation of syllables and sentences. These tapes were later replaced with a pair of CDs, also purchased separately. But the most recent version of this book came from Amazon with a single CD inside the book's front cover, apparently in belated recognition of how essential such audible examples are to learning the spoken language.

The second book in this series, The Most Common Chinese Radicals (Chinese Edition), teaches the basics of writing Chinese - the order and direction of writing strokes is critical and fundamental - and over 100 of the most common radicals (consitutent graphic substructures) of Chinese characters. This subject can be studied at the same time as the spoken language (the focus of the book being reviewed) or as a second phase of study.

The third book in this series, Rapid Literacy in Chinese (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition), teaches the written simplified-Chinese language (as used on the mainland) at a rapid rate. It uses memorizable sentences of about 50 characters per lesson, plus lots of other uses of the newly memorized written characters, by building on the pre-existing knowledge of Chinese spoken vocabulary and grammar. That learning is necessarily largely a rote memorization process, greatly aided by the muscle memory that comes from writing the characters and from the previously-gained familiarity with the common stroke subpatterns within those characters. Because this 3-volume series defers the task of learning Chinese characters until after spoken language and grammar acquisition, the order in which the characters are presented is optimized solely for the character-learning purpose, rather than having to serve the dual role of simultaneously facilitating learning of Chinese grammar and the selected spoken dialect.

This third book also had accompanying separately-purchased tapes or CDs. I haven't bought a copy of the book recently enough to know whether a CD is now bundled with the book, as it was with the first volume (the subject of this review). These CDs for the third book are useful for providing sentence intonation patterns, but are not as essential as those for the first book of the series, the book+CD being reviewed here.

Another series of books on learning written Chinese is also worth mentioning: the two 2-volume pairs Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters, and Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters. (The second volume of each pair is now in publication.) These may be the best way to learn Chinese characters in bulk, but they do so through memorization of structurally-related characters without any regard for the relatively unrelated meanings of the characters and without providing any Pinyin pronunciation. Thus they really require that the student already know the Chinese language quite well, and have a large vocabulary.

All of the books discussed here: the one being reviewed here and the other two in its New Approaches To Learning Chinese series; the old DeFrancis books (start with Beginning Chinese: Second Revised Edition (Yale Language Series) (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) and its corresponding reader); and the Remembering Simplified (or Traditional) Hanzi series are all available from Amazon. I consider this book, Intensive Spoken Chinese (Mandarin Chinese Edition), with its now-accompanying CD, the best modern way for an adult to start learning Chinese, either on their own or in a classroom setting.

One final word of warning: Do not attempt to learn to read Chinese without learning to write it. I tried that in 1984; it doesn't work - I found that I could not tell, when I attempted to read a Chinese character, whether it was a character I knew or one I did not, even though I knew what the character would mean if it were the one I knew. With Chinese, absolute stroke recognition is essential, which can only occur through mastering the writing of the character.

It's a very good book. Quality is very good. Worth a buy if you're teaching. Has a lot of sample dialogues. The approach on grammar is pretty nice. Good to use as a text book. Although it has old-fashioned Chinese in it that Chinese people today don't use anymore. Recommended as a textbook.

This product is essentially a 166 page paperback manual on learning spoken Chinese. Contrary to the reviews, it now includes a cd that has pronunciations (one male and one female) for each lesson's material. However, I have to say that perhaps I'm spoiled by Yangyang's DVD guide, Learn Chinese with Yangyang - Pinyin Lessons because her voice is so endearing and enjoyable. In contrast, the vocal tambre of these recordings is unpleasant. Out of the millions of people in Beijing could they not find two people with pleasant sounding voices? I assume they did not think about that aspect of it.

I am excited about this book because it focuses on the top 1,000 most used Chinese words. As someone living in Taiwan now, the only element it lacks is the traditional characters. I do wish they included traditional characters underneath every word, but that's not a big deal. The quality of the voices speaking is a bigger deal in my mind. So without that I give this a four star. Otherwise it's my favorite grammar on learning Chinese that I've found so far...as far as any sort of systematic approach. It's not really a Chinese Grammar, more of a spoken Chinese tool with Grammar points to clarify for each lesson.

This product has 40 lessons in it with an average of about 25 words per lesson. If you want to, you can jump around after you get going. So if you are going to a restaurant you can jump to lesson 16 and do that lesson. Not everything makes sense that way, but it is helpful. Let me zoom in on lesson 16 to illustrate what a lesson has in it.

The lesson has pencil sketches of some food items with labels on them. Then you have a conversation with key words identified that you may not know. These words are your vocabulary for the lesson. They are identified as they occur in the lesson conversation. The new words occur in a side bar to the right of the conversation. they have the type of word (noun or verb) as well as the pinyin and translation into English). If you don't know anything, you probably need to do the first 15 lessons at least once or twice. But this method forces you to apply what you already know and then grasp new words in context of using what you already know. It's a very good method. The next page gives you substitution drills for certain words. There are six subsitution drills (no translations are provided except for the new words). After that you are given a few grammatical points with some English explanation. The fourth page of the lesson gives you some pretty poor quality black and white photos of the topic at hand. These are labeled in English, Pinyin and Chinese.

Overall this product is a good method, will help you a lot. But it has poor graphics in the book and poor audio quality on the cd. Even so, it's a very helpful tool and is priced right from my view.

I also love [...] for conversational audio.

Intensive Spoken Chinese has a broad assortment of substitution drills, standard in every lesson, which is a great way to make you think about what you are saying. This is a great resource. Highly recommended. If the audio and graphics were better this would be a five star product.

The book is great. But It is not a self study type of book. It is designed for a group class/teacher. Without a teacher it would be next to impossible to learn the language with this book. It would be nice if it came with an audio CD.

Pinyin is not a language. "Chinese" is the written characters. This book emphasizes Pinyin and the Chinese characters are in small sized font almost as an afterthought. This book is typical of the Sinolingua published books in that the fatal flaw is unreadability. If you have "normal" vision you will need reading magnifier glasses to read half the book. Small fonts combined with black letters on a gray background seems to be the hallmark of many Chinese publishers. If you study the book, you will learn to read Pinyin and know what the words "might be". What you will not learn is "Chinese".There are large numbers of Pinyin sentences in the book but not one is translated into English. So, this book is a good book if you already can read Pinyin and Chinese characters, if you have magnifying glasses to read the Chinese characters. The book also provides substitution words to put into sentences, this is a great idea except that the book does not give the Chinese characters for the "substitution" words.

Many people are surprised that there is almost no use of Pinyin in China. There are more English sign than there are Pinyin. Chinese people simply do not use Pinyin except to standardize sounds for characters and to input into computers.

This book "almost" gets it right. If the characters were increased in size, better use of layout, and translations for each sentence, it would be an excellent book.

Fatal flaws;
1) not a single translation into English
2) unreadability due to font size and background colours
3) Book is about learning Pinyin, not Chinese

So, when you pick up that menu in a Chinese restaurant, there will be no Pinyin on it, or in the train station, bus station,.....