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 You can't learn speaking without learning how to make sounds! Aug 02, 2008
This is horrendous! The circumvention of learning the proper pronounciation of Chinese phonemes and tones is doing the reader no good at all. Imagine a language which consists of only tongue-clicking sounds, grunts and hand claps (if such a language existed.) Now imagine that you speak only this language, and someone told you: "I can teach you English using your own phonetic system." This would certainly result in communicational disaster, were you to find yourself in an English speaking area.
Chinese phonetics is difficult for most non-natives. There's no escaping it. If you interchange you pinyin-letters x and sh, your "I love Shanghai" (w ài shànghi) might be interpreted as "I love looking like the sea" (w ài xiàng hi). If you don't learn the tones correctly, there is no difference between the words "to buy" (mi) and "to sell" (mài). There certainly are important semantic differences conveyed by the small nuances in sounds and tones. If you really want to learn to make yourself understood in China, and not learn how to sound like a garbled radio, buy a book that starts out with lots of pinyin and sound/tone practice.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Promise to improve pronunciation falls short Jul 18, 2008
When beginning to study any foreign language, one of the most important things to remember is that you will almost certainly be required to master sounds that do not exist in English. The rolled 'r' of Spanish, the high 'u' of German and French, and the aspirated 't' of Hindi are all sounds that do not have corresponding equivalents in English. Mandarin Chinese is a language that contains many such sounds, and it is especially important to be careful when recognizing and producing these foreign sounds as each one is assigned a tone that determines the meaning. While Speak E-Z Chinese claims to help beginning learners navigate this difficult sound system, it instead replaces the Pinyin pronunciation system that the 1.4 billion Chinese speakers world-wide have used for decades with a new English-based approximation that brashly ignores tone completely. Speaking Chinese without proper tone is akin to speaking English using only one vowel. While context and inflection may help you make yourself understood, the "modest degree of fluency" that the book promises will continue to elude you. The content of the book is somewhat random and also occasionally inappropriate for young learners.
Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 Essential for picking up Chinese Dec 14, 2007
What can I say? I am traveling to China, and looked at many resources to learn some Chinese. This is by far the easiest one to learn quickly and easily for someone who only speaks English. Their online resources and responsiveness to inquiries are a big bonus. The authors truly care about improving relations between China and other countries, and have made this available for a very reasonable price.
19 of 19 found the following review helpful:
Fantastic super-handy reference Dec 12, 2007
I have bought a few books and an audio course in order to learn some Chinese for fun and also because I wanted to communicate better while visiting China. If I had my pick of just one resource, this awesome, efficient little reference would be it. The best part about it is the pronunciation key for us Westerners to pronounce pinyin, it helps enormously. The book starts with the pronunciation guide and the four tones, then moves on to the essential phrases in every contexts, such as transportation, currency, time and calendar, and restaurants. It teaches both words and short phrases and sentences that introduce you to sentence construction. At the end there's a 130-page dictionary that is surprisingly complete, and includes a pronunciation key for every word. Most of the times I want to know how to say something out of the blue, it's there.
As an added bonus, there's a *lot* of interesting things here that you are unlikely to learn from any other source. I am not sure why they are there but there they are, some are pretty funny. If you want to tell someone she's cute or sexy or that you love her, if you want to curse, call somebody an idiot or crazy or odd, how to call BS, how to say Chicago or California or Spain, how to say general or female/male body parts, how to say football or basketball, how to say honey (both as the sweet liquid and as a term of endearment), how to say "I'm stuffed", how to say so-so, and a bunch of other things, look no further: it's all here.
You can also download an audio version of the book for free from their website, I have not tried it yet but I definitely will. I took this book everywhere I went to in China. Highly recommended.
4 of 22 found the following review helpful:
 Wash your mouth out with soap! Nov 09, 2007
While this book is fairly well laid out and the content is helpful, be forewarned that this book contains profanity that I found offensive. I bought this book to help me communicate with my newly-adopted teenage daughter from China. I never expected to see the sh- word or the fu- word in a translation book. Who really needs to know how to curse in Chinese? Sheesh.
Just know what you're getting when you buy this.
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