Title: A very good book for beginners
Review: I liked this book very much. The basics of Chinese sentence structure and grammar are explained very clearly and in a very illustrative way. In many places the author comments and explains about the "balance" of the sentence - which is very important in speaking fluent Chinese. In fact, I owe much of my understanding and quicker learning of the language to this book. The vocabulary is very useful, although in some chapters the number of new words is a little big. The tapes are OK but nothing beats a native speaker to practice on. One major fault in my opinion is the use of simplified characters. It's true that they are the ones that are used in China today, but not in Taiwan and not in Hong Kong. It is easier to study the simplefied after having learned the tradional ones than vice versa
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