Essential Mandarin Chinese Phrase Book

By Philip Yungkin Lee

Book Overview

Original

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0794600379
• ISBN13: 9780794600372
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: Periplus Editions (HK), Limited
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.3" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Uses standard Pinyin, which is great, but also challenging

This book is the only phrase book I've seen that uses standard pinyin. This is good because: 1)Standard pinyin is the official standard romanization for Chinese and is used on all signs in China. 2)It has the accent marks to indicate the 4 tones (and 1 neutral tone). 3)All Chinese people are required to learn Pinyin in school. Pinyin takes a while to read and pronounce properly, so the learning curve on this book might be steeper than other books. (Don't try to read pinyin like English, or no one will have any clue what you're saying!) But if you have any aspirations to learn Chinese correctly, I recommend this book as a good introduction.

Impressive

This phrase book is very useful, especially for foreigners who have some basic of Mandarin, but want to improve or use when they travel in China (For some who doesn't have basic, it's still useful because there is Chinese character written in the book, so they can show to locals). It also brushes up your memory of vocabularies.