Chinese for Dummies by Wendy Abraham,

ISBN 978-0471788973

Chinese for Dummies,

by Wendy Abraham

ISBN 978-0471788973

[...]
This is the worst book in the entire Chinese language field.

There is not a single Chinese character in this book or a single Pinyin word/syllable in it. This books holds the ridiculous position that a learner does not need to study tone.

This is without a doubt the absolute worst book written on learning Chinese.

Stupid is what stupid writes. This is more like a novel with occasional Pinyin thrown in. There are many errors in Pinyin word construction, errors in tone markers and errors in the English writing!!!!

"Chinese" is a written language, i.e. the characters. There is not one Chinese character in the book.

Although this may seem ideal to the initiate learner, if the Chinese characters were not necessary to learn the language, 1.5 billion Chinese would not have learned them.

This book makes no attempt to demonstrate homophones and the representative characters that they phonate. The worst part of this book are the "Talking the Talk" sections. Pinyin stacked on top of a new "dummy phonetic" code and English on the bottom is just too confusing to sort out. With many examples the Pinyin, "Dummy phonetic" and English are all on the same line. Tables would have solved this. And why squeeze it into a narrow column and waste half the page??

And what is this "dummy phonetic" code. The whole idea of Pinyin was to construct a phonetic code to represent the Roman/English alphabet. Most letters and letter combinations are pronounced the same. Why create a whole new phonetic system?? So now there is IPA, Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles and Dummy Pinyin Code. Why not just point out the ones that are different rather than filling this book with a new phonetic system. Then there is the issue of the joined Pinyin words and the separated "dummy phonetic' words.

There is in fact very little Chinese learning in this book.

The attempts at humour are lame and irritating, offensive really. There is too much effort to make things funny and they just come over as stupid.

The CD is horribly indexed, like how hard is it to create a useful file name?

Then there is the translations. They do not follow grammatical rules and many take great liberty at rearranging word order when it is not necessary.

Ultimately this is a phrase book with a very mediocre CD.

And $31.99? I could have bought 3 useful book for that price.

And what is with these "Words to Know" with black backgrounds??? It is hard to read!!!

This is a shameful effort and a deception. What a wast of money.