I bought the Graded Readers 2 and 3. Previously, I had read a few of the Chinese Breeze readers, but they have not yet published beyond level three and that had become too easy. There is quite a big difference between the two series. Chinese Breeze have the advantage of no pinyin, and their MP3 recordings come with slow and fast readings which is great if you want to read along. Graded Readers have pinyin, but a card to block it out is provided, and the MP3 track is read at a pretty fast pace. The thing that makes the Graded Reader series so good, though, is the fact that you are reading real stories rather than those written for language students. The stories are therefore much more interesting. As you would hope, there is plenty of vocabulary and grammar recycling built into the adaptations. If you want to read Chinese for pleasure, these books are great....

Superb book about a subject little known in England. Interesting for both the general reader and specialist....

The idea of the book is great: each chapter introduces a group of words, and the exercises in that chapter are based mostly on those words, which is ideal for level 5 (there are 2500 words to memorize). The problem with this book is... that there's no cd, and the material you can download from this site or from the publisher's website is not complete, you find only the recordings of the listening exercise, not those of the dialogues and of the list of words, as it is stated in the book description (and until mid-April, you couldn’t find those few files either, even if the book has been released in January).

To make things worse, the customer support from Sinolingua simply doesn’t exist… I have been writing to them many times, and so far I’ve got only one answer (in March, when they apologized and promised that they would publish the files by mid – April). I still don't know if the complete file set will ever be posted......

1) Book arrived in good times (abt 3 weeks).
2) Book qrrived in good condition.
3) Good work Purple Culture!...

I use this text book for HSKK intermediate preparation course. It's a good textbook because there are a lot of short conversations and activities. But for grammar exercise, it's sort of a weak point of this book since it focus mainly on oral speaking. So the teacher has to look other place for grammar exercise....

A gorgeous volume in many ways. Beautifully done with the information as well done as the artful presentation. Combined with "The Ten Stages of Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Traditional Chinese Medicine", a diligent student can travel far down the road to understanding TCM....

A Great Classic of TCM. The depth of information contained in this book is a study course that is immediately illuminating, and by successive thorough examinations and ponderings can take a student far down the road to understanding TCM....

I Love this video.

The only thing bad about Purple Culture was that shipping took a long time. I bought the Contemporary Chinese set for level 1 students, and I have been using it to self teach myself Chinese. I can tell that working through this series will be great as the format of the lessons, etc, is really good for learning Chinese. Purple Culture offered good prices for the books and was a 1-stop-all-inclusive place where I could buy the whole series with one order, rather than buying each textbook/character book/exercise book serperately as I would have had to on Amazon....

Now that I have had a chance to sit down and watch the China National Day 60th Anniversary Military Parade and Evening Gala, I am really impressed with what I saw. It is amazing how strong and wonderful the national patriotism of China is. This Chinese national holiday is so colorful and very well orchestrated and is filled with pride for the Chinese people and all that they have done and developed to become a modern nation. Here is a visual an example for the rest of the world to follow. I would recommend everyone watch this three CD set to get an inside view o f a very exciting nation and all that is happening there in modern times....