Customer Reviews

Speak Chinese today: A Basic Course in the Modern Language (Tuttle Language Library)

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

 

 

I've spoken Mandarin Chinese for about 10 years now, and speak it fluently. I began my study with Speak Chinese Today. I always tell friends and students that one of the best ways to learn Chinese is by listening to dialogues on tape.

The essential part of Speak Chinese Today is the authentic dialogues perfomed by native speakers. Each of the dialogues is spoken at a natural speed, which is not too fast for beginners since the accompanying text includes each dialogue in Chinese characters, Roman characters (Pinyin), and English. The dialogues are rich with culturally-important information essential to learning not just the language, but the culture the language represents. These dialogues also help listeners learn the rhythm of the language, a very important element.

Even 10 years later, I sometimes recall parts of dialogues from Speak Chinese Today. For me, it has been and continues to be a catalog of useful phrases and vocabulary. Repeated listening allowed me to file away most of the wonderful dialogues in my mind. I highly recommend using this audiotape in conjunction with the book as the foundation of any elementary or intermediate spoken Chinese language course.

The Chinese language is used by more people in the world than any other language. This book is one of the best aids to learning the language. It makes learning fun and challenging without being too difficult.

The brilliant idea of placing one page completely in Chinese and then a similar page complete with the phonetic pronunciation in English is very useful for revision and re-enforcement.

I highly recommend this book.

I bought this book to try and teach myself some basic chinese vocabulary. I'm starting out with zero knowledge of the language and a title like "speak chinese today" implied to me that it would be a good book to start with.

The book did not come with an audio tape to follow along with, I'm not sure if it's a different edition or not, and since there is no phonetic guides given for ANY of the chinese words I am unable to even get started. The book gives one page in chinese phrases and one page in english phrases so you can match them up, which is a great idea if you can hear the phrases being pronounced. Without the tape you're out of luck. It does cover some vocabulary and basic phrases that will come in handy later though.

I ended up purchasing "Chinese in 10 minutes a day" since it has some phonetic guides included, maybe I'll come back to Speak Chinese Today later on.