Teach Yourself Complete Mandarin Chinese (Learn Mandarin Chinese with ): Beginner to Intermediate Course: (Book and audio support)

This is the best book I've tried for self learning some Mandarin Chinese as a hobby. It advances at a nice gradual pace and I found this book's lessons using English, pinyin, simplified characters, and its audio files very helpful. I feel It really helped me make progress in a short amount of time. A minor complaint is the lack of glossary in the book make it necessary to look at previous lessons or use a dictionary sometimes. I find the Teach Yourself series of books that I use (Ancient Greek, Latin, Cantonese, et al) are rather well done and keep me interested in the subject. I genuinely think learning Chinese is a lot of fun now- it's a shame I am so lazy. Definitely recommended. Also recommended: Tuttle's Reading and Writing Chinese (especially the revised simplified edition if you are learning Mandarin), a great source for character recognition.

What I needed I found in this book!

The app for the audio is particularly good. The book is very clearly laid out. It seems to me to be geared to learning to write as well as read and as such goes in pretty deep pretty quickly - in an academic/learning sense. The audio helps a lot with the pronunciation.

I think the funnest part is listening to the audio and understanding what they are saying. I do dislike that they introduce a bunch of unknown words in the beginning of each chapter especially in the early chapters I think beginners will feel a bit put off but if you go through just one page you are introduced to the vocab and Hanzi. Overall though really fun book I read everyday.

Très bonne méthode pour apprendre le mandarin. Dommage que la police de caractères soit aussi fine. Obligé d'utiliser des lunettes grossissante.