80 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU WANT TO LEARN CHINESE!!!!!, March 9, 2004
I've read some other complains about how this book "is too tough for beginners," but to me it's totally the wrong attitude to take when learning a language.. i've learned three other languages now, and it's not that i'm good at languages-- i've just found better ways of learning.
For one, you have to get make sure to get ridiculous amounts of exposure to whatever language you are trying to learn. To me, if someone complains that there's too much to learn, well, that's what they signed on for: if you want to learn a whole new language, you should be prepared to be immersed in it beyond belief, and trust that your mind will do what it takes to make sense of your environment. Beginners especially need to kick themselves in the pants, otherwise you are wasting your time. This book does cram a lot of the information into the later chapters (the beginning chapters are basic, actually). When you think about it, it means that you are getting your money's worth.
If a chapter is too much, take a couple more days on it. But the alternative is buying another, easier book that, in the end, cheats you out of your money, because you pay the same / higher price, thinking that "it's more your level" when in fact they just give you <u>less info per page</u>. The trick is allowing yourself access to a lot of information, so that you can attack it at your own pace.
I enrolled at a the "Learn Chinese" course at Zhejiang Da Xue, China's third largest university, but found that the money I had paid (a full semester's worth) would go to waste; the end of the course text book was still just focused on how to say "I will eat food". I expected that after six months at this program, I'd be able to say something a little more complex than that. But it was such a baby course that focused so much on characters, that progression into the meat of the language became a real issue.
This book is for those people who want to speak chinese. Now, I looked all over the place IN CHINA, and I bought many many books. All were either too character focused (thus containing too few pages on how to speak chinese), or "Intensive Speaking" books that were really thin (I suspect because those books were designed for short-stay visitors to China), which frustratingly enough, stopped only a little farther at "I will eat food tomorrow".
This book was a godsend. I had it shipped from the US to China, cause it seemed like exactly what I needed: a book that teaches spoken chinese, finally. I was so impressed with it, I vowed to write Ms. Scurfield a rave review, but I was too busy speaking chinese I never got around to it until now.
Now characters are important, but to me its a more leveraged use of time to focus on speaking while in China, because one can always learn characters with flash cards. It's a completely different game to learn the spoken language, than it is to memorize characters, but all of the other books I encountered often confused the two.
Using her book, I learned Chinese in a little more than TWO MONTHS. Granted, I studied it like 4-5 hours a day for those two months, and I practiced it by talking to a lot of random strangers, but still, that is MUCH more than I can say about the usefulness of those other books.
Ms. Scurfield's book is INCREDIBLY WELL THOUGHT-OUT and ORGANIZED. This book glows with a commitment to teaching the reader chinese, it's in the way it's written and presents its information.
I was living in a dorm building with many other english speakers who were trying to learn chinese, and they too had many books, but I was really the envy of all with my simple pinyin, simplified but effective book, that my friends from England and New Zealand were always asking to look at.
And the price is ridiculously cheap, considering you get all that REAL instruction, and TWO TAPES, which are a must have, because they give you practice hearing how each word should sound, which is so essential to spoken Mandarin.
Of course, the work is on you to speak, and study, but with other books even if you are diligent, they will limit you with their all too academic orientation on characters.
Elizabeth Scurfield rocks, and she should be recieving much more acclaim then she does.
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