Chinese for Beginners: Learning Conversational Chinese

by Yi Ren, Xiyuan Liang

This user-friendly guide to the basics helps you learn how to speak Mandarin Chinese quickly and easily by drawing parallels with something you already know--English.

Chinese is a fascinating language that can seem impossibly difficult to learn at first, but is relatively easy if you focus on the spoken aspect. This revised edition contains new dialogues, cultural notes, IT and social media vocabulary, and new manga illustrations.

This book is designed for everyone who wants to learn to speak and understand colloquial Chinese--whether it is for business, pleasure, or travel to China. A lighthearted guide that brings Chinese to life in a down-to-earth fashion, Chinese for Beginners makes language learning fun.
Chinese for Beginners contains lots of extra hints and tips drawn from the authors' many years of experience in teaching the language to foreigners. Answer keys for the exercises are provided, and an "Extend Your Vocabulary" section in each chapter helps you to remember and understand more words that you'd think possible.

Genres: Language, China

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2012

About the author

Yi Ren taught and did research in Beijing after graduating from Tsinghua University. On moving to the U.S. she began to teach Chinese and has more than 15 year Chinese-teaching experience. She has published 15 articles and one book in Chinese. At her adult students' urging, Yi decided to offer her dynamic Chinese teaching method via Chinese for Beginners to help others learn the language while enjoying it. She lives with her family in Denver, Colorado.

Xiayuan Liang practiced medicine in China before coming to the United States. She currently is an associate professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine. In her spare time, Xiayuan likes to read and to discuss interesting topics with friends--in Chinese, of course!

Reviews

[Jeff Cromwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book and learning the vocabulary, syntax and grammar for basic daily communication in the pinyin phonetic symbol system with graphics presented in 190 files in the audio list. Based on both small and medium talk in dialogue with the navigation in space time, this book provides the English/Chinese translations for greetings and introductions for getting together. How to apologize and say thank you as well as talking about the weather using numbers with the time and date. Making a phone call and going to the restaurant or tea house or where to go for sightseeing is a common experience of travel with discussion in the book. Obtaining money at the bank to go shopping and use transportation is something that always requires additional vocabulary beyond small talk. This minimal vocabulary with realistic dialogue for these activities mentioned is provided in the glossary. The 16 poems along with cultural and etiquette tips are great for preparation of Chinese travel and adventure.

These poems ordered by chapter are:

Thoughts for a Quiet Night by Li Bai
Love Sickness by Wang Wei
Ascending the Stork Tower by Wang Zhi Huan
Pastoral Peace by Wang Wei
Song for Travelling Son by Meng Jiao
Spring Dawn by Meng Hao Ran
A Village Chant by Shao Kangjie
Quatrain 2 by Du Fu
Love Stirs in the Spring by Li Bai
The Industrious Peasant by Li Shen
Drinking Tea With A Friend by Lu Yu, On the Double Ninth Day by Jiao Ran
On Seeing Off His Friend by Meng Hao Ran At Yellow Crane Tower by Li Bai
Quatrain 1 by Du Fu
Gazing At The Waterfall On Lu Shan by Li Bai
Golden Threaded Clothes by Anonymous Poet
Departure From Bai Di Cheng by Li Bai

The sound of the poems, idioms and proverbs are wonderful in Chinese and fun to research in detail with a Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Hanzi drawing at www.qhanzi.com. Overall, I highly recommend this immersion into 34 practical real-life scenarios with dialogue for writers and for those that love the sounds and graphics of the Chinese language.

[John Tipper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice Book.

Good one for beginning students of Mandarin. Has fine illustrations and is great for vocabulary learning. Recommended for various students.

[Walt Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unexpectedly strong introductory text. Interesting, useful, relevant content, nicely matched by the author's informative yet casual tone. The result is something far richer than a phrasebook and far less ponderous than most introductory language textbooks.

I've thumbed through dozens of introductory books on learning Chinese; this is one of the best I've encountered. Supplemental audio content, available for free, adds even greater depth to the text.

My only qualms are that I purchased an ebook version, and the content clearly hasn't been optimized for that format. In some exercises the Chinese text seem to be images rather than actual text; on a Kindle those images often appear rough and jagged. The Chinese poems provided at the ends of each chapter suffer from a similar drawback. If those technical issues could be resolved, I'd easily award this book five stars.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite its 200+ page length, this book hardly teaches anything. Though it does have brief dialogues with basic words and sentences, most of the book is literally just filled with random stock images, long ramblings on Chinese history, cartoons and poetry that isn't even written in Simplified characters. It also has a lot of cultural notes, but that's not really the point of a language book. Also, it doesn't teach any handwriting, or grammar, and offers no way of re-inforcing/testing you on the little vocab it has, so you're likely to forget it all.

这是一本二百页的书，但是教差不多没什么。有一些小的对话跟简单的词语和句子，而且最大的分是照片，长的历史段，动画和诗集-写用旧的汉字。书说关于中国文化，但是那真的不是学语书的目的。 也不教你写用手或者中文的语法，也从来给你考试- 所以你不要记得教的词语。

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very informative and continues to help me learn Chinese. The formatting is unintimidating, the writing style is easy to understand, and the PDF and audio files enable you to learn wherever you are! I recommend this book. -Jordan Koornneef