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Title: A gentle introduction for absolute novices
Review: This book should have appeared in "For Dummies" series. It assumes no prior knowledge whatsoever about Chinese language or culture, and does a good job of giving a background on both. The writing style is fluent and the book is fun to read. The book was written some twenty years ago. Maybe those days people knew less about China, because it assumes no common knowledge at all. It covers the language, history, cultural background, etc. It is not a textbook, so do not expect to know any of these topics after reading it.
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