by Ray Daniels (Yenbooks, 1993)
Review by: John Pasden
This book is part of a popular series which is designed to help the reader meet members of the opposite sex in foreign countries. It’s designed for people who are not seriously studying the language.
That said, it does have some useful vocab and phrases in it, but I can’t stand reading it. Why? Because there are no Chinese characters in the whole book, and the romanization method used is not even pinyin, it’s some “easier” method that the author devised.
You might be able to get this book in some cities in China, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the most casual learner.
For what it’s worth, the revised edition has both pinyin and 汉字, but the author retains his own crappy romanization. I bought it on a lark, and was looking for something more akin to street language, like ChinesePod’s WOS. It has very little.
November 26th, 2006 at 3:10 pmHrmm thanks for the heads up.. I was looking for some lighter reading, as I am still very much a beginner, in my local language bookshop last week and saw this book. I will definitely give it a miss now. I did buy a decent quality book for beginners called “Easy Peasy Chinese” but as yet I haven’t had a good read of it. It has a great pronunciation guide, which I have already found useful. It covers a broad range of topics without going into a massive amount of detail..
Anyway.. thanks for the info John..
April 27th, 2008 at 8:18 pm