Customer Reviews

Making Out in Chinese: Revised Edition (Making Out Books)

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

 

 

This book is full of useful colloquial slang expressions, as well as good conversational phrases. Its sections are divided by theme (e.g., Basic Phrases, Getting Acquainted, I've Got the Munchies, etc.) which make finding phrases pretty easy.

My only gripe is that the author does NOT use standard "pinyin" phonetics to write out the Chinese words in the Roman alphabet. It seems as though he has modified the standard pinyin consenants and vowels in an effort to make it sound more like real English pronounciation. This is great for someone who has never studied Chinese using the standard pinyin system, but for some who has trained themselves to read pinyin (which is a screwy system to begin with) the phrases in the book are difficult to pronounce, and more importantly, difficult to memorize (through visual symbolic recognition based on already-learned words).

I would hope that a new revision of the book be written for standard Chinese pinyin, if possible.

P.S. The phrases and words related to sexual intercourse are in good number and detail. The author did not abstain from including even the dirtiest of phrases.

This is a very small phrase book. As far as phrase books go, it contains much less information than any regular sized phrase book. As such, it may be most suitable for someone who knows no Chinese and would like to learn just a few expressions.

On the other hand, this booklet does include few slang expressions, some insults, dating and sex-related language which you won't find in a regular phrase book.

All words / expressions are written in English, in Chinese simplified characters, and in pinyin.

The new edition, which has been revised by someone other than the original author now contains Chinese characters, Pinyin and a simplified pronunciation guide for each entry. If you are looking for a complete guide to slang then this book is disappointingly thin on the ground. It gives one way to say something, that is a valid way, but it misses out other ways that are just as likely to be encountered in common, everyday usage. I was impressed with some of the attention to cultural, idiomatic usage, that was very helpful, such as the euphemistic way Chinese people refer to a woman's level of beauty. Finally, one caveat with learning Chinese - If you are starting out, you can't learn to pronounce it well from a book alone, even if it does include Pinyin, or other make-shift phonetics, as this one does. You just won't be understood. For the price, this book is OK, but just OK. I feel that a lot more could have been included and hope that the publisher will produce a follow up like they did with "Making Out in Japanese".

This is a review of _Making Out in Chinese_ (revised edition) by Ray Daniels.

When you learn any foreign language in an academic setting, your teachers begin with the standard, "proper" vocabulary and grammatical constructions. This is as it should be. You cannot understand the exceptions until you understand the rules, and slang changes too quickly to be built into the textbooks. However, at some point you need to branch out and learn more specialized terms and expressions. The "Making Out Phrase Book Series" from Tuttle (a respected language learning publisher) is designed to address this need. (The fact that many copies of this book will just be bought as novelty items or gag gifts does not detract from its serious use.)

The selling point of this slim volume is its vocabulary, phrases and slang related to romance and sex, but it also includes sections on topics like "Basic Phrases" and "Getting Acquainted." This book is obviously intended for use by those with little or no background in the Chinese language. The Introduction explains how to pronounce the tones of the standard Mandarin dialect. The main text tells you how to pronounce phrases, using the Pinyin phonetic system (the one you would learn in school), but it accompanies this with a non-standard, "intuitive" romanization. (So "Thank you" is both "Xie xie" and "Shieh-shieh," with tone marks in each case.) Chinese characters for phrases are provided, which is useful if you can read them, but also helps if you just want to point to an expression like "Where is the restroom?" instead of trying to pronounce the question yourself. (Characters are given in simplified form, the standard in the People's Republic, and the phrases are taught with a Beijing accent. Since casual travelers are more likely to go there than anywhere else, that's probably a good choice.)

So how good of a job does Making Out in Chinese do? The book is often helpful and informative. For example, elementary textbooks don't teach you that, in East Asia, blood types are thought to be indicators of one's personality. This book tells you how to ask someone his or her blood type, how to say what your type is, and what personality traits are thought to go with that type. The book also explains the idiom for saying what your Chinese astrological sign is. And, of course, there are a number of expressions related to the human anatomy and explicit sexual acts.

Regarding accuracy, I am not a native speaker, so I cannot vouch for all of the slang expressions. But I do recognize many of them from my own visits to China. This is encouraging. On the other hand, just in the first 21 pages of the book, I noticed SEVEN mistaken tone marks. If getting a tone wrong every now and then is the only mistake you make, it will be no problem to being understood. But since beginners are likely to be making other mistakes in pronunciation, a mistaken tone might make the difference between what sounds like Chinese with a heavy foreign accent and complete gibberish. In addition, if the author got so many tones wrong, I worry that there may be other careless mistakes in the content. Finally, I found the explanation of the Chinese tones less helpful than it could be. You are unlikely to get a third tone right if you are told only that it "is pronounced with a lowering of the voice" (5).

Overall, I would say that this is a fairly helpful and interesting book as a supplement to standard language classes, textbooks and CDs. But I would not recommend it as your sole or primary tool for learning Chinese.

Absolutely terrible. What a disappointment.

I was hoping that it would teach me a model conversation to introduce myself to a woman and ask if she would like to chat a bit, perhaps leading to other things. No where is this sort of information found inside.

But if I want to ask her "who farted?" make her "guess," and accuse her that "you did," it's all right there on page 49.

It is often just a list of words rather than useful phrases, with no context on how to use the words other than to just blurt them out. For example, pages 20-21 lists: "after, before, time, sometimes, always, seldom, ccassionally, never, not even once..."

There are only 96 pages, including the title, copyright page, and table of contents. Yet fully TWELVE pages are devoted to curses and insults.

If your idea of whispering sweet nothings in her ear is to say "I'll kill you," just consult page 62 for the translation: "Wo yao sha le ni."

Very handy!

Apparently the author thinks this will help one to accomplish "Making Out in Chinese."

Give this book a pass.

The first problem with this book is the lack of Chinese characters making it virtually worthless for more advanced Chinese learners. Secondly the romanisation is not pinyin, nor any other recognisable system. Thirdly this should be entitled "making out in Taiwanese" as a good 20~30 percent of the phrases in the book would not be recognised by mainlanders.

If you want a book on Chinese slang then get either 'Mutant Mandarin' or 'Outrageous Chinese' by James Wang (China Books, San Francisco) although these include a lot of liumang and Beijing punk slang that doesn't travel well, or Li Shu Juan's 'Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Slang in China' (ISBN 962-238-222-3, Hong Kong) the only failing of which is to not always distinguish Cantonese and Northern slang.

I like this book a lot! It teaches you Chinese but not like most books you can find in North America, the Chinese in this book is more like how Taiwanese people would use not Chinese people, (like how American English is different from British English) but this book is really thin, not too much stuffs to learn.

Well, the book certainly provides what the title promises. I was not disappointed! Now to "try it out" in the world! Recommend this even for the purposes of getting a more "real" and useful vocabulary addition.

This is a nice little book that contains many commonly used phrases in Chinese speaking countries. It has phrases that common folks use, not obsolete text book phrases only foreigners use. So if you want to do a better job of being understood by the locals, this book could help. I wish I had it when I went to China, but I'll definitely bring it with me the next time I go.

I first encountered this book on a plane to the mainland. A group of people were passing it around and laughing almost to the point of tears. They were reading the books contents and making a lot of jokes in Chinese. Later, in China, I encountered the infamous romanization system that they use there and could hardly make out a single pronounciation. Later, I bought a copy of Making Out in Chinese and was so relieved that the author did not write the pronounciations using the inane romanization system. I could actually say what I wanted to say in Chinese and be understood. I would highly recommend the book to those who hate the ping-yin system. I would also recommend the book to those who want to learn Chinese that is not taught in the classroom. A big thumbs up for Making Out in Chinese!