Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself . . . Complete Courses)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

I had this book before I started taking college Chinese and it was too big a bite to chew. Ten credit hours and two trips to China later it excellently serves as a supplementary classroom material. This book is well organized. Chapter one starts out with standard, Hello, How are you? My name is so and so. I come from so and so. Then it progresses to telling more about yourself and your family, ordering food (very important when you travel to China.), making hotel reservation, ... etc. This book is the best overall. That means, there are better books on Chiness reading out there if you are concentrated solely on reading. (Try John DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Reader) If you want an absolute beginner then try Berlitz's.

When I started purchasing these resources I was an absolute begginner of Chinese. I got on to Amazon.com and ordered practically every well rated resource. This particular one has some good information in it, but for a beginner it goes way too fast. I found the tapes to be useless. FOr the absolute beginner very intent upon learning chinese I would recommed "a modern course in Chinese" THe tapes that come with it are invaluable. But if you just want a good book, then get Beginner's chinese, by Yong Ho. THough as an extra resource it does have allot of good information.

I like this textbook for the most part, although the tapes have a couple of problems for absolute beginners who have no Chinese friends they can go to for help. The 1st tape goes into detail with Chinese sounds, but there is no way of knowing which sound corresponds to which letter in pinyin. This is maddening, since you can't easily figure out how to pronoune written words. There is some tone practice, which is much clearer. The best part about the tapes is that the speakers start out slowly, and speed up to normal by the end of the 2 hours of lessons. It really helps you ease into rapid-fire (i.e., normal) Chinese. I'm a college foreign language teacher by trade, and I have to say that I like the simple, clear grammatical explanations (and believe me, I've seen some real disasters). Chinese grammar isn't too complex, but it's very different from English; this text presents grammar in a logical manner, and incorporates the grammar covered into that chapter's dialogue. The setup is well thought out, and the vocabulary is useful. Although no text can replace a live teacher, this book is a good way to start with Chinese, especially if you have no one to take lessons from.

I liked this book very much. The basics of Chinese sentence structure and grammar are explained very clearly and in a very illustrative way. In many places the author comments and explains about the "balance" of the sentence - which is very important in speaking fluent Chinese. In fact, I owe much of my understanding and quicker learning of the language to this book. The vocabulary is very useful, although in some chapters the number of new words is a little big. The tapes are OK but nothing beats a native speaker to practice on. One major fault in my opinion is the use of simplified characters. It's true that they are the ones that are used in China today, but not in Taiwan and not in Hong Kong. It is easier to study the simplefied after having learned the tradional ones than vice versa

In preparing to go to China, this book was recommended by two different tutors - one from China (and his wife) and one from Malaysia. It is sure to give you a very strong foundation in the language. Make sure you get the version that comes with the tapes.

I am a student of multiple languages and have recently purchased this book. Now there are divided opinions about the "teach yourself (insert language)" series of books. Well, I like some of them, especially this one. One must realize that each of these books is written by a different person and that the entire serires is not written by the same people. This particuliar book is invaluable to me in my study of chinese. The one bit of advice I have is this: if you are not good at picking up foreign pronunciation, especially non enlgish/non romance languages, then this is not for you. THis book has a very small section on pronunciation so this is your book only f you can grasp the sound of Chinese easily. OVerall, I REALLY reccomend this bok for the beginnin Mandarin student.

I have been teaching Mandarin using this book for two years, my impression is that this book has quite comphrensive introduction of Mandarin and explaination goes into very details, which sometimes may cause confusion. The book is written a few years ago, and some of the content is out of date or not accurate,one more thing is it is difficult for a student to learn it by himself as the text becomes difficult very quick.

Teach Yourself Chinese contains a major instructional flaw in that there is no correlation between the PRONUNCIATION GUIDES in the BOOK and the PRONUNCIATION EXAMPLES AND PRACTICE on the CD. Though the manual seems to do a good job of explaining the sounds and tones associated with spoken Chinese, the CD is not correlated with any written form. Therefore, when listening, one cannot determine whether a sound is a slight variation of the previous sound or a new sound that is much like the previous sound. Not providing associated pinyin text of at least the first part of the CD is pedagogically irresponsible. Be warned, you will be frustrated with this program if you think it will provide you a clear association between the written form and the spoken form of the examples provided.

Teach Yourself Chinese is an introductory book for English speakers wanting to learn Mandarin. It covers a diverse set of words and situations; just enough to help get the reader acquainted with a small conversational vocabulary. Every chapter begins with a brief dialog in Chinese, followed by an English "walkthrough" describing the nuances and grammatical rules applied in the conversation. To help with pronunciation and listening, the accompanying CD's are handy.

While this book is a great starting place for beginners, it has many drawbacks. It is deficient in teaching how to read and write in Chinese. The first several chapters do not even make use of Chinese symbols, instead relying solely on pinyin spellings. When symbols are used, they are only the simplified set of characters and not the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. I believe that integrating reading and writing is essential for memorization of Chinese vocabulary.

Another drawback is despite all the author's efforts to teach pronunciation and tonal usage, using this book without a real Chinese tutor is not enough. Most of the setbacks of this book are not its fault, but the fact that the difficulty of Chinese pronunciation and learning how to write make it impossible to learn without a mentor. Perhaps the biggest problem is that "teaching yourself" Chinese using any method is extremely difficult. I recommend buying this if you are interested and very determined to learn Chinese, but make it only one tool in your arsenal of learning materials.