I am learning Chinese. The Chinese Talk Series is a solid reference point for useful, practical colloquial intermediate level conversation. The authors have done their homework. A variety of alternatives are always presented to say the same thing. The enunciation is clear and standard. Each book acts as an excellent bridge between beginner and intermediate levels....

Great book! Because of the rhythmic repetition, students remember content easier. This is the first book that makes teaching character recognition in a useful manner. Great game opportunites exist. One thing that might improve it a little is more variety of rhythm schemes. But still a great book. Students may not remember proper tone markings on a test, but when using this book, they instinctively know when tones to chant are said incorrectly. Chants are much more useful than songs for the teaching of tones....

very interesting and high quality video I enjoyed watching

There is a small thing that disappointed me
The photograph of the site makes you think that you get a DVD with a hard cover
as a collector's DVD. but it is a normal plastic cover

but in the end it's all about the content of the cover
and that was perfectly done

so for me it was worth the money...

This book is a must buy for any student of TCM. Concise and easy to reference. It doesn't get distracted by loads of side info. Top notch information put together by a dedicated group of physicians....

I lived in China for about 2 years and it was often difficult to find books that taught the Chinese Language for a Western Mindset. A friend found these books break down the language into segments where you learn the most common characters and then how the characters you learn form new words. In the last few years there might be better books that have come out that teach language learning for Mandarin but when I left in 2002, there was nothing I found that took this approach. There are companion Cassettes but I am unaware if they are available here....

This has some nice simple short stories, with an MP3 with clear native speakers, written in Hanzi and Pinyin, with a (somewhat flimsy) card to cover up the Pinyin. The stories are nice and seem typical of China during the immediate post-Mao and early Deng Xiaoping era, so they seem quaint today. The writing style is direct with lots of repetition. An incomplete vocabulary list is at the back, and unusual phrases are explained in marginal notes, so a low-intermediate student can pretty much read right through. Only about 1000 characters are used, so the level is low-intermediate. The book is light and medium size, easy to carry (but not pocket size)....

This is an intermediate/advanced reader on China's history.
This book is part of a series, the others are: 'Common Knowledge About Chinese Geography' and 'Common Knowledge about Chinese Culture'. Together all three books will cover essential knowledge about China.

The chapters are as follows (my own edit of the content):
1. Ancient history (the "Peking Man", Confucious,...)
2. the Qin and Han Dynasties (the Great Wall, the First Emperor,...)
3. the Division of China (the Red Cliff battle, the Ballad of Mulan,...)
4. the Sui and Tang Dynasties (the Grand Canal, the Great Poets,...)
5. the Five Dynasties (Bao, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo in China,...)
6. the Ming and Ching Dynasties (Zheng He's voyages, Japanese pirates,...)
7. Modern China (the Opium Wars, May 4th Movement, the Nanchang Uprising, the Nanjing Massacre,...)
8. Contemporary China (Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Hong Kong handover,...)

The book tries to cover as much as possible, so do not expect in-depth coverage. It is intended as a core introduction only. In this volume you will read about all sorts of historical events: science, literature, wars, philosophy, and so on. It reflects the cultural history of China.
The dialogues in simplified Chinese are written on the left page, the English translation on the right.

There is no glossary listing for each reading and no vocabulary index so you may need a good dictionary at hand, just in case.
It does however list unusual words that you most likely have not come across in your textbooks, it also has boxes with extra information.

There are no exercises in the book, just readings.

All the books in the series are visually very attractive - there are coloured images and photographs on almost every page, and the layout is excellent. In this volume you get pictures and illustrations of architecture, historical characters, archeological tools, old manuscripts, poems, and so on. I really like all the visual information.

This is a high-quality and high-standard book. I highly recommend the whole series....

I love this book and its predecessor, book I. This book, which deals with simplified characters, introduces you to plenty of new characters in each chapter, contextualized in a reading passage, which does not use pinyin. This is followed by detailed explanation of the new words, with definitions and phrases containing those words. Then the individual characters are highlighted, with examples of how they combine with other characters to form words. Also, where a complex version of the character exists, a visual comparison is made between the simplified and complex forms. After this there is a "Snowball" section with extra exposure to the characters and characters from previous chapters. There is a nice mini-dictionary at the back of the book.

In book I, 400 characters were introduced. Book II builds upon this, introducing an additional "500 of the most frequently used characters...in a wider context of about 4000 words formed with them", as the back of the book states.

I find this book to be thoughtfully designed and well-organized and highly accessible for people that want to study on their own at their own pace. I didn't find anything that came close to it for my purposes, which is why I ordered it from abroad since no bookstores in North America carry it anymore, which is a shame....

We used this book in our listening class at school. It is a good basic listening book.

The Ceremony lived up to all the expectations, with a display of performing Arts, Lights & Fireworks equal to anything that I've seen in the past....