Elizabeth Scurfield

I bought the book and CD pack a few years back, hoping to review my Mandarin. I think this book is not suited for people who have zero knowledge in Chinese Mandarin. I also have to say that this course aims to teach its students Mandarin from Mainland China. This means that the Chinese Mandarin uses expressions, slangs and pronounciations of Chinese Mainlanders (probably those from Beijing). The characters are simplified (those who want to learn classical traditional characters will be show more disappointed). Although the book offers a few lessons on traditional characters.

The main focus of the book is on conversation and dialogues. Although I think the book is trying to cover a lot of topic in a few chapters. I suggest that other students find other ways of learning the language, using this book as a supplement/support to the lessons they learn.

The book and CD was helpful to me since it helped me review my Chinese and prepared me for learning Mainland Mandarin, which is different from the kind of Mandarin I learned from school (Taiwanese Mandarin). show less

I can't comment on whether you could actually teach yourself Chinese with this book, but it's an excellent supplement to a classroom course! Scurfield's grammar explanations are valuable, and her exercises tough, even for someone who's already done a semester of Chinese, and have patched quite a few holes in my grammar knowledge.

For a book for beginners it suffers from small size fonts for characters. I also found it to be perhaps a little too advanced for a total novice – especially for one who had no or little knowledge of Chinese language. It suffered from some degree of character translation straight to English bypassing pinyin. The book also included some traditional (complex full form) characters that perhaps could have been omitted. Overall an example of a language book written by a non native speaker.

Chinese Grammar