Recommended Chinese Study Books for Beginners
Easy Peasy Chinese: Mandarin Chinese for Beginners
by Dorling Kindersley (Book & CD) (Paperback) from £5.79
This is a lovely book for a complete beginner. 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. This book will equip you with enough vocabulary to talk about yourself a little and to get by on a holiday in China. The book itself is about A5 size, and the CD comes slotted inside the front cover, so you could easily fit it in your suitcase.
Mastering Chinese: The complete course for beginners
(Master Languages) (Book and Audio CDs, 384 pages) by Catherine Hua Xiang from £19.01
This is an excellent book for beginners and pre-intermediate learners of Chinese. The book focuses on developing learners communicative language skills. The author fully understands the needs and characters of learners of Chinese as a foreign language, offering learners choices in terms of learning characters or pinyin only. This is particularly encouraging for adult learners. The book consists of 12 thematic units in daily life. There is a revision unit every three units which gives learners the opportunities to consolidate language skills and assess their learning progress. Learners have ample opportunities to practise pronunciation, listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. The cultural information section in each unit will improve student’s cross-cultural understanding.