Easy Peasy Chinese: Mandarin Chinese for Beginners Hardcover – Audiobook, 3 May 2007

If you are a beginner in Mandarin Chinese, then this book is definitely the one for you. EASY PEASY CHINESE is exactly what it says. Don't be fooled by its small size, because this slim volume is packed with all sorts of goodies to get you started. This book is full of photographs, and overall it is bright, fun, modern and very easy to use. It will get you speaking, reading and writing simple but useful Chinese right from the beginning.Each page is full of colourful illustrations and photographs to reinforce your learning, and you get an important insight into Chinese life and culture along the way.The CD provides an indispensible aid to acquiring authentic pronunciation and it ensures you get ample practice in the tones, pronunciation, vocabulary and sentence patterns. All this is achieved in a fun way without being overwhelming.The book comprises 9 Sections with a total of 46 short Units overall, which cover a wide range of subjects including, pronunciation and tones, writing Chinese characters, meeting people, making friends, my family, my body, food and dining out, modes of transport and buying tickets, getting around and asking directions, shopping and how to haggle, Chinese names, hobbies and sports, modern slang, celebrations and festivals, to name but a few.EASY PEASY CHINESE is NOT a glorified phrase book, but an introduction to Mandarin Chinese, which enables the beginner to make up his or her own simple sentences step by step. What I found really useful were the units which help you to recognise the basics of Chinese characters and how they are made up, how to put them together to make new words, how to write characters and the guide to stroke order, how to count from 1-10 and beyond, how to say the days of the week and dates, how Chinese names are given and what they mean.EASY PEASY CHINESE provides a very solid foundation. By the end of this short course, you will be a very competent beginner, who will then be able to move forward and make very quick progress to a more advanced stage of language learning.I give this book + CD full marks. My only regret is that this book was not around 40 years ago when I first attempted to learn Chinese!

I find this book the most helpful basic resource out there for people totally new to Mandarin Chinese.The text inside the book is very colourful and in large simplified Chinese font just so that you can see the complex characters more clearly! Plus it's divided into basic bite size topics for ease of learning. One section that was particularly good was that it showed how to write the order of different strokes to generate a chinese character. Also how they put them together to make a word and understand the meaning behind it. But that was just a tiny section, so if you would like more practice on learning how to write in simplified Chinese, then I would recommend La méthode Assimil writing book 'L'écriture chinoise' - problem is that it's in French, so if you can't understand it then I suggest you use google translate or a French dictionary to get the meaning of the Chinese characters.Another helpful aspect of this resource is the CD. They read all the bits in Chinese in the book making it easy to follow. The only downside is that I find that they speak a bit fast so it helps to repeat the track.Overall I now find Mandarin Chinese less scary and easy to follow more than ever after going through this book. Coming from a Cantonese background, I find that it is also good for those who speak different Chinese dialects and want to learn Mandarin (which is the most spoken national Chinese language), as my mum found this to be very useful when she communicates with others who speak Mandarin, and it was easy to spot the slight differences in both the simplified writing system and pronunciations.So I really do recommend this book to everyone of all ages who are starting out in Mandarin Chinese.

Firstly I'd like to say that I have studied Mandarin before and I bought this because I have recently started studying again, so a lot of what is covered in the earlier stages of this book I already knew.However that takes nothing away from this book, for a complete beginner this book is worth twice what you pay for it!The way it's laid out is good, the illustrations make it fun to read, it gives you characters and PinYin from the start which is essential, the CD is useful and the topics covered are also great for building your "Chinese Language Foundations".My one criticism is that it doesn't cover degree or school subjects and that the vocabularly is still a little thin, sure you could probably go to China for a short stay and knowing all the vocab in this book would probably get you through. But if you're planning on going there for longer, for studying, immigrating or business then this should only be used as a quick start accompanied by other books. In saying that however my sister (who has been studying Mandarin for 7years) learnt one or two words from this book.To round off, this book is exactly what it says in the tin really, an easy-peasy book that teachers you the Chinese you need to be a solid beginner and advance into intermediate territory.