"Teach yourself Chinese" by Elisabeth Scurfield

This has been sitting here far too long! I will thus make it very brief: this is an excellent book, strongly recommended if you also buy the CD:s. As the reviews on Amazon.com suggests, it is a very fast-paced book at first. Don't mind the "I found the tapes to be useless." comment, though, since I can't possibly imagine what this means. The CD recordings are extremely well done, with a mix of various speaker to make the dialogues very useful! Check for yourself below.

Don't forget to Look Inside! There you will find the first lessons. - You will have to spend more time on the first lessons than you might be used to, but it sure pays off in case you are patient. The first 10 lessons are in pinyin only, but with the Hanzi versions published in the back of the book. I found it a bit troublesome to flip back and forth so I wrote the texts on my computer and printed them out.

Download files from the Google Group

Let me know if you have any problems with downloads, etc.

In short: This book is great even if you have a text book you are satisfied with, at least if you are a bit like me: Variation is FUN!



No proof, but a personal experience: I haven't repeated this very much, but I can nevertheless still remember most of what is said after a couple of weeks away from it.