Essential Mandarin Chinese Phrase Book

by Philip Yungkin Lee

A concise Mandarin Chinese phrase book and guide to Chinese language, "Essential Chinese" contains basic vocabulary necessary for communicating in Mandarin Chinese. Have you ever considered learning... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0794600379
• ISBN13: 9780794600372
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Periplus Editions
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.3" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Preparing for a trip to China

I bought this book in preparation for our trip to China. It has a lot of useful phrases that can be used in various situations travelers might find themselves in. The text is very small, which makes it compact, but requires the use of reading glasses for many of us over 40! I was dissapointed that there wasn't more vocabulary for navigating airports.

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.