Trying to make the Chinese language quick and easy to learn is almost impossible. The Chinese language is hard, and that's that. The simplest breakdown of the language consists of 4 tones, 6 simple finals, 21 initials, 30 compound finals, and thousands of characters. Don't forget some 40 basic Chinese radicals and 11 basic strokes.

...shenme? (literally,...what?)

Zhongwen: the basics of Chinese
Read & Speak Chinese for Beginners speaks truth near the beginning of the book -- Chinese is a tonal language. Although this slim book comes with an audio CD to help with pronunciation and listening skills, the text doesn't put emphasis on the tones! There are 4 tones to the language, yet the text does nothing to teach the learner about the tones. If the learner doesn't understand the importance of tones, he or she might, one day, mean to say one thing politely but end up saying something else that's rude! Once you start learning the hard way, it's hard to break habits.

Xue Zhongwen: studying Chinese
The book breaks down into 8 "lessons":
1. What's your name?
2. Where are you from?
3. What's this?
4. Where is it?
5. What's it like?
6. How do I get there?
7. Who's this?
8. What do you do?

Moreover, The book breaks learning down into 5 feature sections:
- Key Words
- Language Focuses
- Activities
- Games
- Audio CD

That might seem fun, but how can you have fun if you're going to get frustrated? The book isn't always understandable, despite it's claim on the front and back covers: "Clear explanation of basic language structures in manageable bites!" and "Clear explanations of how to use basic phrases in everyday conversations!"

In the back are also the answers to the activities and games. Very tempting to just cheat...

Shengci: new words
It immediately jumps into a few key words, including the famous "ni hao" ("hello") and "zaijian" ("goodbye"). It includes the Chinese pinyin (the way of writing Chinese in Roman script), the Chinese characters (though you never learn how to actually write them), and the English definition. Again, it doesn't focus on the tones.

Furthermore, they use hyphens between syllables, which confused the heck out of me when I purchased this book in hopes of getting ahead before I actually started taking my Chinese class. They say it's not universal, but it will help you as a beginner to break down a word into its parts. The hyphens are completely unnecessary.

Why did I get confused? Well, when I was writing them out, I was confused whether the hyphens meant that the word/phrase would be connected in Chinese pinyin, or there was actually a space where the hyphen is. For example, they put "ni-hao" -- does it mean it's really "nihao" or "ni hao"? It's "ni hao". However, they also put "wo-de ming-zi" (which means "my name") -- is this one "wo de ming zi" or "wode mingzi"? Actually, it's "wo de mingzi". How the heck was I supposed to know that if I didn't take a real Chinese class? They constantly use these hyphens throughout the book, notating no real way of writing the Chinese pinyin.

The book also includes new words in the "Language Focus" sections not found in the "Key Word" sections, so the reader will have to figure out which words means what since the book doesn't tell the exact definition of each separate word/character.

Did I also mention they don't even teach you numbers 1-10 until page 70? That should be one of the first things you learn (and that people want to learn), besides "hi" and "goodbye".

Yufa: Chinese grammar
Their grammar isn't perfect. I'm not saying mine is, but they could at least teach it right. In their "Language Focus" sections they try to explain the structure of basic Chinese sentences. They say "wo-de ming-zi jiao mu-lan", meaning "My name is Mulan". Well, first of all, must I say they suck at capitalization? "Mulan" is a name, and as we all learn in elementary school, proper nouns are capitalized, even in Chinese. After presenting you with this long sentence, they say, oh wait, this can be shortened to "wo jiao mu-lan", which is actually the more common (and correct, must I add) way to say it.

They give you sentences like "zhe shi yizi" (This is [a] chair), and tell you that "Chinese does not have an equivalent of a/an..." Well, they just don't want to teach you! If you really wanted to write a sentence with a "a/an" equivalent, it would be: "Zhe shi yi ge yizi" (literally, "This is one chair" -- just like the Spanish language saying "un/una"). The book tries to make quick progress in learning Chinese, but Chinese grammar is not easy. Trying to learn basic Mandarin Chinese does not happen in a less-than-100-page book.

Xie Hanzi: writing Chinese characters
Chinese isn't only about reading and speaking -- it's about writing the characters, also. I know that the focus of the book is reading and speaking, and they even specifically note that "The focus is on enjoyment and understanding, on reading characters, rather than writing them yourself", but the best way to learn how to read the actual Chinese characters is to learn how to write them. Chinese characters aren't simple either, and that's probably why they excluded this part of the learning process -- oh my gosh, it would make the book longer and thicker! Chinese characters must be written in certain stroke orders, so if you're a beginner attempting to copy the characters presented to you in the book, you won't even know if you're writing them correctly, even if it looks the same. And if you're studying the wrong way, it's hard to fix that.

There should have been more emphasis on the Chinese characters, since there are several pinyin words/phrases that sound exactly alike (spelling AND tones) but mean different things (and you'd know the difference by the different characters). Though, there are also several characters that have more than one meaning for one character.

The book just basically expects you to memorize the characters they present to you, not even telling you that you're only learning about 1% of the whole freakin' language.

Ting luyin: the audio CD
Fortunately, there's an an hour-long audio CD included with the book. It's kind of silly: a guy with a British accent explaining the basics of Chinese to you. There is a "native speaker" pronouncing the words, but I'm not sure that listening to this CD will actually help you speak Chinese.

The audio CD sometimes also includes phrases that aren't even in book, corresponding with the CD. After teaching you how to say "hello, my name is..." the guy says, oh you might want to add "hen gaoxing zhen dao ni" ("very pleased to meet you"). First of all, you wouldn't know how to write the pinyin nor the characters for this phrase since it's only on the audio CD. And for beginners, it's hard to understand what the speaker is saying if they're not accustomed to the way Chinese sounds just yet (especially since this appears near the beginning of the CD) -- how do you know what you're hearing and that you'll be saying it right? How inconvenient! Second, if you really want to say "pleased to meet you", it would be "renshi ni hen gaoxing". Ugh.

Zhaopian bu tai haokan: ugly pictures!
I just need to say that the drawings are terrible. They had a drawing of a cat that just looked like it went through mutations in the evolutionary process.

Rongyi haishi hen nan: is Chinese easy or hard?
Chinese is hard. There's no way to get around that. The book advertises on its front cover: "The Easiest Way to Learn to Communicate Right Away!" Yeah, the easiest way to learn Chinese the wrong way. I bought this book the summer before I started taking Chinese classes, and I had no knowledge of the language beforehand whatsoever. I pretty much gave up on the book because it was confusing sometimes, and I knew I'd be learning Chinese later anyway. Some of the grammar items that I touched on in this review, I had questioned my professor in class saying "why isn't it said like this?" or "can you also say it like this?" only to have my professor tell me that it was the "English way of saying it." Obviously, English and Chinese are two completely different languages; basically, what my teacher was saying was that you can't just translate English grammar/structure directly to Chinese. When I look back on the book now after a semester of taking Chinese, I know what the things mean, but I remember how confusing it was before I started taking Chinese.

It takes time to learn a language. And if you're looking for a quick way to say things in Chinese, just buy a phrase book, look it up online, or find a friend that does know how to speak the language. Don't waste your time and money on this book, it's not worth it. Chinese students who already are familiar with more basics could probably use this book for reviewing earlier vocabular and such, but it's not the best source to use for reviewing.

***However, if you do want to study Chinese on your own, the most common textbook used is Integrated Chinese (now up to Second Edition) by Tao-chung Yao and Yuehua Liu (make sure to get the Simplified Character Edition!). The Integrated Chinese system includes a textbook, workbook, character workbook (which let you practice your strokes and writing your characters), and audio recordings that all correspond to each other. They're very easy to understand and takes you through the language and includes very good notes and examples of the language/grammar.

Recommended: No