Easy Peasy Chinese: Mandarin Chinese for Beginners Hardcover – 1 January 2010

Book is very good for beginners but the CD of this book is not there

The format of the book & the CD is good except... between every track they play the same traditional music with stringed instruments. The same piece every time. The tracks are short, so you hear this squeaky piece of music every few minutes. I couldn't take it. The authors were trying too hard to be as cutesy & upbeat as the title, and they should have filled those wasted seconds of grating music with something of substance.

My wife and I have found this book invaluable in helping us communicate with my Son's in-laws, and has helped us with the tones and pronumciation of several words. It enabled us to look after them in the maternity hospital when my grandaughter was born.

Very simple and clear introduction book in Chinese culture and language.

This is a great introduction to Mandarin, going through several subjects containing a lot of very useful information. Some parts are a little lacking, like only a couple of radicals are introduced, and most especially the explanation of the pronunciation of the tones is too brief. In particular it is deceptive about the third tone, not explaining how it usually changes. Learn about this important point when you learn the tones or else you will experience great contradiction and confusion concerning how you are told to pronounce words and how you hear them being pronounced!

I am learning chinese as part of my university course and bought this as a sort of pre course warm up.It's easy layout and uncluttered format is great for a beginner, it got me used to seeing a mix of mandarin and English on the page (my actual textbooks are pretty intimidating)The audio cd has a lot of tracks on and is of good sound quality.You use it as prompted in the book and it's a lot more comprehensive than I thought it would be.Although this is technically marketed towards young people I would say that it's a good base for anyone wanting to learn.Any help is good help, and it covers a lot of basics.