For the tourist or casual learner, May 31, 2003
　

This book is a good choice for learning spoken Mandarin in preparation for a trip to China. You'll learn a lot of phrases you need to know as a tourist and the book is more thorough than a simple phrasebook. You'll also learn how to put sentences together and by the end of the course you will develop a good feel for the language. Four ninety-minute tapes accompany the cassette version. Though professionally made, too much time is spent by the narrator walking you through the book. The time would have been better spent by supplementing the dialogs. The dialogs themselve are invaluable. The book uses romanized Chinese (pinyin) and therefore you will not learn how to interpret Chinese characters. Although the book comes with a nice fold-out dictionary the Oxford Starter Chinese Dictionary would make a wonderful accompanyment to this volume. This is about the easiest introduction to spoken Chinese that can be found.

There are better books., December 14, 1999
　

I read this book when looking for a language text. My goal is/was to actually learn to read, write and speak chinese at some point in the future. After leafing through it for about 30 minutes, I noticed that it was severely lacking in many aspects. It offers sparse chinese language instruction. If you are looking for something extremely basic this might work for you. However, you might be better off with any number of phrase books. If you are genuinely interested in learning chinese, I can recommend ANYTHING from either the faculty of PEKING UNIVERSITY or if you are interested in computer based instruction Triple-Play Chinese CD-ROM by transparent technologies. I recommend the triple-play as a basic introduction into chinese because it is inexpensive and has voice recognition software to aid in the pronunciation of pin-yin. There are other software titles out there, but I believe its the best one for the beginning student.

I hope this review helps you choose the right book.- Corcoran