Customer Reviews

Talk Mandarin Today (Book Only)

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I am learning Mandarin on my own (with occasional help from a native speaker) and found this book + CDs very useful. Unlike many other elementary text books, Talk Mandarin Today also covers some essential vocabulary related to business and information technology.

A minor flaw is that a few of the vocabularies and translations in the 3rd section of the book (Lesson 21-30) are incomplete or inaccurate.

As the other reviewers have mentioned, this book is for students of Mandarin who wish to do business in China/Chinese. There is nothing wrong with this, as that is an important subset of Mandarin learners.

However, this book is in no way a replacement for a Chinese text book. It is more like a phrasebook of business Mandarin with a little bit of grammar and a few sentence patterns.

For someone who has already studied Mandarin, this book could be useful for learning business vocabulary and certain colloquial expressions. But other people would do best to find another book.

An especially debilitating problem is the horrendous audio component of the course. It comes with two CDs and each lesson gets about 3-5 minutes of audio. Even though the course follows the exploits of Mr. Green, the audio is narrated entirely by a single woman and, since she does both voices in each conversation, this makes it difficult to follow sometimes. Also, the English narrator occasionally butts in and reads off any English phrases in the Chinese conversation, as if the Chinese narrator would have been unable to say those words. It seems as if the audio was done on the cheap, to the detriment of its effectiveness as a teaching tool.

If you already know some Mandarin, wish to learn some business vocabulary and have money to burn, then I recommend this book. Otherwise, I would recommend some other book, perhaps one by Yong Ho. Unfortunately, there are few all-around good books for learning Chinese, as the language (especially the written language) is so vast. If you become serious about learning Chinese on your own, then you will most likely amass a small library of books, each teaching the language from a different angle.

I am using this book to learn some Mandarin on my own, and this seemed like an OK book for doing so. A bit dry, though. It's usable, but there must be better books out there.

The main problem is that this book is business-oriented to the extreme. It follows the adventures of a Mr. Green, who apparently spends most of his time in his office talking about business cards, email, computer viruses, and about a dozen different ways of sending letters and packages through the mail system. Thus, in section 5 we learn the word for "computer software", in section 8 we learn words for "email attachment", "computer virus", "web page", and "telex" (a prehistoric communication device), while section 9 introduces "registered letter by air" versus "express letter delivered by courier" among others.

Fortunately, in the later parts of the book Mr. Green actually gets out of the office, so we finally learn how to order a coffee, buy stuff, or talk to normal people.

I understand this book tries to target the business market, but this goes too far. I guess if you choose to ignore this and get through the first dozen chapters, it's an OK book. And on the plus side, while this book may not help you find friends or get laid, you will be able to talk to your Chinese secretary about every possible detail of office management.

The book was classified as used and that was definitely true. It was not well kept. The content itself does not match the title for people who have little to none background in Mandarin lessons. The CDs are a must for those students and then, I think that they would probably not speak Mandarin today.