Complete Mandarin Chinese (Learn Mandarin Chinese) (Teach Yourself)

Love going through this book, comprehensive and detailed

This is the best book I've tried for self learning some Mandarin Chinese as a hobby. It advances at a nice gradual pace and I found this book's lessons using English, pinyin, simplified characters, and its audio files very helpful. I feel It really helped me make progress in a short amount of time. A minor complaint is the lack of glossary in the book make it necessary to look at previous lessons or use a dictionary sometimes. I find the Teach Yourself series of books that I use (Ancient Greek, Latin, Cantonese, et al) are rather well done and keep me interested in the subject. I genuinely think learning Chinese is a lot of fun now- it's a shame I am so lazy. Definitely recommended. Also recommended: Tuttle's Reading and Writing Chinese (especially the revised simplified edition if you are learning Mandarin), a great source for character recognition.

I think the funnest part is listening to the audio and understanding what they are saying. I do dislike that they introduce a bunch of unknown words in the beginning of each chapter especially in the early chapters I think beginners will feel a bit put off but if you go through just one page you are introduced to the vocab and Hanzi. Overall though really fun book I read everyday.

I agree with everything in the previous review by Daft Wader. I am also an advanced beginner in Mandarin Chinese, and wanted an actual textbook. I have found Teach Yourself language books to be very helpful in the past. However, if you want to learn to write and read Chinese, it helps if you can actually see the characters clearly....they are much too small in this book. Also, a different font for the characters might have been better. But, overall, it seems to be an excellent resource.

Good content structure, great Audio. Highly recommended.

Excelente!

While the title suggests some substance to the content, this textbook concerns itself exclusively with tourist lingo. I am bilingual and have a broad background in language learning...I was looking for something more academic than this. This book hardly goes into the grammar of Mandarin in addition to giving only highly cursory exposure to conversational speech. If you're looking for tourist vocab, this is a slam dunk! For my academic needs however, it doesn't hold up. I'm planning on returning it.

This book (and others like it in the series) does a great job with points of grammar and definitions of words and phrases, but this book lacks adequate drills of the lesson material. It seems they expect the student do devise their own grammar and vocabulary drills. I am halfway through this title and am having to constantly go back and revise/relearn previous lesson material using my own system. For the price and given the long-standing reputation of the TY series and publisher(s), this is a shortcoming. I own other recent TY language books, and this is the typical approach to their idea of learning. The older TY book approach may have been more grammar intensive, but it had its place. Maybe a hybrid approach would be better. Some were better than others: I own most of the older previously published McKay texts. That is my opinion.

What I needed I found in this book!

Um excelente livro, simples e prático. Acompanha áudio o que, para uma língua tonal, é muito importante se ter haha

Learning Mandarin is a completely new venture for me; initially, I approached it with some trepidation. However, a few weeks later, I am now feeling much more confident, the book is well organised and the explanations very clear.Online resources at library.teachyourself.comBeing able to view new vocabulary (Glossaries) on my computer screen has an unexpected advantage- the characters appear very bright and can be magnified at the touch of a button! Searching is super simple too. (As mentioned by a previous reviewer, the Chinese characters in the printed book are on the small side, so I have invested in a page magnifier: problem solved.)The online audio resources-vocabulary and conversations- are equally user friendly.An excellent book which I highly recommend. (All that is now needed to succeed? my own time and effort).

Très bonne méthode pour apprendre le mandarin. Dommage que la police de caractères soit aussi fine. Obligé d'utiliser des lunettes grossissante.

The app for the audio is particularly good. The book is very clearly laid out. It seems to me to be geared to learning to write as well as read and as such goes in pretty deep pretty quickly - in an academic/learning sense. The audio helps a lot with the pronunciation.