Customer Reviews
speak E-Z Chinese 
2008-10-31
between the the CD's i bought and the book i am slowly learning to speak chinese i am planning to go to Beijing this spring to visit a little 2 year old boy i am sponsoring at New Day Foster Home the best thing i have ever done they have a website i log on every day to check on him and his buddies he is cute as a button all of the children(special needs) are beautiful want to feel good about yourself? "adopt" a child at New Day they have plenty to choose from Blessings Donnie
You can't learn speaking without learning how to make sounds! 
2008-08-02
This is horrendous! The circumvention of learning the proper pronounciation of Chinese phonemes and tones is doing the reader no good at all. Imagine a language which consists of only tongue-clicking sounds, grunts and hand claps (if such a language existed.) Now imagine that you speak only this language, and someone told you: "I can teach you English using your own phonetic system." This would certainly result in communicational disaster, were you to find yourself in an English speaking area.
Chinese phonetics is difficult for most non-natives. There's no escaping it. If you interchange you pinyin-letters x and sh, your "I love Shanghai" (w ài shànghi) might be interpreted as "I love looking like the sea" (w ài xiàng hi). If you don't learn the tones correctly, there is no difference between the words "to buy" (mi) and "to sell" (mài). There certainly are important semantic differences conveyed by the small nuances in sounds and tones. If you really want to learn to make yourself understood in China, and not learn how to sound like a garbled radio, buy a book that starts out with lots of pinyin and sound/tone practice.
Promise to improve pronunciation falls short 
2008-07-18
When beginning to study any foreign language, one of the most important things to remember is that you will almost certainly be required to master sounds that do not exist in English. The rolled 'r' of Spanish, the high 'u' of German and French, and the aspirated 't' of Hindi are all sounds that do not have corresponding equivalents in English. Mandarin Chinese is a language that contains many such sounds, and it is especially important to be careful when recognizing and producing these foreign sounds as each one is assigned a tone that determines the meaning. While Speak E-Z Chinese claims to help beginning learners navigate this difficult sound system, it instead replaces the Pinyin pronunciation system that the 1.4 billion Chinese speakers world-wide have used for decades with a new English-based approximation that brashly ignores tone completely. Speaking Chinese without proper tone is akin to speaking English using only one vowel. While context and inflection may help you make yourself understood, the "modest degree of fluency" that the book promises will continue to elude you. The content of the book is somewhat random and also occasionally inappropriate for young learners.
Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color
Essential for picking up Chinese 
2007-12-14
What can I say? I am traveling to China, and looked at many resources to learn some Chinese. This is by far the easiest one to learn quickly and easily for someone who only speaks English. Their online resources and responsiveness to inquiries are a big bonus. The authors truly care about improving relations between China and other countries, and have made this available for a very reasonable price.
Fantastic super-handy reference 2007-12-12
I have bought a few books and an audio course in order to learn some Chinese for fun and also because I wanted to communicate better while visiting China. If I had my pick of just one resource, this awesome, efficient little reference would be it. The best part about it is the pronunciation key for us Westerners to pronounce pinyin, it helps enormously. The book starts with the pronunciation guide and the four tones, then moves on to the essential phrases in every contexts, such as transportation, currency, time and calendar, and restaurants. It teaches both words and short phrases and sentences that introduce you to sentence construction. At the end there's a 130-page dictionary that is surprisingly complete, and includes a pronunciation key for every word. Most of the times I want to know how to say something out of the blue, it's there.
As an added bonus, there's a *lot* of interesting things here that you are unlikely to learn from any other source. I am not sure why they are there but there they are, some are pretty funny. If you want to tell someone she's cute or sexy or that you love her, if you want to curse, call somebody an idiot or crazy or odd, how to call BS, how to say Chicago or California or Spain, how to say general or female/male body parts, how to say football or basketball, how to say honey (both as the sweet liquid and as a term of endearment), how to say "I'm stuffed", how to say so-so, and a bunch of other things, look no further: it's all here.
You can also download an audio version of the book for free from their website, I have not tried it yet but I definitely will. I took this book everywhere I went to in China. Highly recommended.
Wash your mouth out with soap! 
2007-11-09
Now readers can by-pass the complex Pinyin system in favor of user-friendly words and sentences provided in straightforward phonetic English. Packed with humorous slang and favorite Chinese idioms, only SPEAK E-Z CHINESE provides the means to communicate in fresh, contemporary Mandarin at only a glance. Free audio companion offered online at www.CathayCafe.com.
A Chinese Launguage survival Book must Have 2007-10-27
This book is an essential book to have i wish i had it the first time i went to China i will take it the next time i go thats for sure the authors of the book desperately need to make one that is easy English so the Chinese will have something that is how valuable this book is well worth the price and worth it's weight in gold please don't ever let this book go out of print it helped me actually pronounce the words so the Chinese people wouldn't think i was an idiot The Best Book You will ever own for the Chinese Language at the price why not buy Two!! it is the book i use to communicate with my fiancee and her family the girl i am going to Marry is Chinese
:)
Very good resource 2007-10-24
This book is what you need as a tourist. No fancy stuff, just essentials. They have a website where you can download the audio files so you can exercise your accent(very important!).
Chinese is A breeze! 2007-01-19
Whether you're going to visit China or you have some chinese friends, or you just want to say a few things in chinese the next time you go to a chinese restaraunt this book really does make it easy! Just pick 3 or 4 words or phrases each week and practice. Well worth the money!
This is the very best Chinese phrasebook! 2006-08-26
I've found this book to be extremely helpful in being able to grab a word or phrase at a glance and then pronounce it accurately. Designed for the beginner, SPEAK E-Z lives up to its word on making the learning process enjoyable and easy. I have three other Mandarin language books and they remain on the shelf. Thanks to its simplicity in usage and its fun bits of humor, SPEAK E-Z CHINESE is the only phrasebook the traveler in China needs.
