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Q: Any recommended books to study Chinese from scratch ?
I looked for many books in the library and none of them was convenient for a total beginner. All books expect you to learn through reading pinyin. I want to study Chinese on my own using any good learning book. Do you have any good book which covers all basic skills?
11 years 14 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
Does any one book cover all basic skills? You can try Learning Chinese Characters by Matthews for hanzi. You can buy it on amazon, but it's not cheap.
If you're a total beginner,..wouldn't learning through reading pinyin easier?
Silverstein:
Yea of course, but I want to learn other skills too like speaking and listening.
Most books just use pinyin, since the characters can be learned using software. Heck ,even the MIT college courses only spend their time teaching the pinyin and how to speak, and skip over the writing skill.
My recommendation:
Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide by Claudia Ross (Teaches grammar, uses both pinyin and characters, great tool to self-teach, or have a multilingual Chinese friend prepare lessons with). Learning the characters is easy, how to use those nouns, measure words and adjectives is the difficult part, and this books is great at teaching the grammar. It's not a fun book to read, with no pictures, funny stories and cultural facts, but it will definitely teach you what you want to know.
I would use the website Memrise to learn the characters and pronunciation. It's the fastest way to learn the words. FluentU is amazing to improve listening skills, and you will learn the characters and grammar as well. Bth can be used on a computer, iPad, and a phone for Memrise.
New Practical Chinese Reader book 1, (there is a series) is good, make sure you get the CD that should come with the book so you can hear the tones and sounds.
I'd go with any beginner book, but you do need to hear the pronunciation. I'd also recommend the Oxford Chinese-English pocket dictionary. It has pinyin and Chinese characters and gives good examples of usage.
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I took a three-pronged approach.
(1) "Teach Yourself Chinese Mandarin" for a basic nuts and bolts intro to the language. The book starts off in Pinyin but then over time starts using Han zi.
(2) As stated above, Memrise is an excellent and interesting method (not to mention competitive, there's league tables and all sorts) to learn characters. It offers nothing in the way of grammar or sentence structure, but for characters its really good.
(3) Pimsleur audio method for sentence structure and pronunciation, particularly the latter. I can't recommend Pimsleur highly enough. It has some detractors, but if you're in any way an audio-favouring style of learner, its superb.
