[hottie]

Can anyone tell me a good book shop for books on learning Chinese? I have a phrase book but I want something that goes into more detail.

Also does anyone have a favourite book that they would recommend?

Hottie

[Sazzy]

Cantonese or Mandarin?

[hottie]

Ideally a Cantonese one, but a good Mandarin one would be very useful too.

Any ideas?

Originally Posted by Sazzy

Cantonese or Mandarin?

[maddogmerrick]

A good detailed book for learning Mandarin is "Teach yourself Mandarin", a part of the Teach Yourself series. The book is written by Liz Scurfield and could be purchased in most good bookshops in HK. If you can not already speak good Mandarin you would definitely need to purchase the cassette tapes as well.

Good luck!

[discobay]

I have an excellent resource. It's titled "Learning Chinese Characters In Hong Kong" a second edition by Chan Kwok Kin and William Crewe. It's short in height but wider than a novel and contains photographs of actual HK signs depicting the Chinese character referred to with the stroke sequence used to write them. Each character is accompanied by Yale, Lau and Pinyin pronounciations. Only cost me $96 some years ago.

[hottie]

Thanks Discobay and Maddogmerrick, I will look out for these titles.

Hottie

Originally Posted by discobay

I have an excellent resource. It's titled "Learning Chinese Characters In Hong Kong" a second edition by Chan Kwok Kin and William Crewe. It's short in height but wider than a novel and contains photographs of actual HK signs depicting the Chinese character referred to with the stroke sequence used to write them. Each character is accompanied by Yale, Lau and Pinyin pronounciations. Only cost me $96 some years ago.

[Sand]

Have a look at:

Routledge's Basic cantonese, and
Routledge's Cantonese. A comprehensive Grammer

These have been my main source of learning Cantonese.


Cantonese. A comprehensive Grammer is especially good as it covers idioms as well as formal speech.

[hottie]

Thanks Sand, found it on Amazon.

Originally Posted by Sand

Have a look at:

Routledge's Basic cantonese, and
Routledge's Cantonese. A comprehensive Grammer

These have been my main source of learning Cantonese.


Cantonese. A comprehensive Grammer is especially good as it covers idioms as well as formal speech.

[JohanSWE]

Basic cantonese
intermediate Cantonese
from Routhledge publishing
I would rate them 2.5 / 5
In my opinion they are not as good as some other choises out there.
The text layout is bad so is the use of fonts, which makes the pages feel very clutterd, and its hard to focus since there is always something on the following page to distract you from the section you should be reading.
It does cover some usefull topics and is a good source to build up a vocabulary, which leads me to the other drawback.. there is no Cd with audio files. So you might develop a good vocabulary, but you have to find someone to help you with the tones.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Communicate in cantonese
Published by Commercial press HK
I rate it 3.5 / 5

Very easy to read, and it comes with a CD wish is a great plus.
Defenently a good starter book, since it will help you build a basic vocabulary, and help you get up to speed with speach.
Bad thing is the narrator, he's preformance makes listening to the cd about as exciting as getting bills in the mailbox.
---------------------------------------------------------------
No sweat cantonese
Published by Asia 2000
Rated 5/5

This book it great!
There is just a few drawbacks, 1 the topics are the same coverd in every basic cantonese book, i feel like i read them 4 times already.
2nd, the guy who helps to narrate the CD seem to speak annoyingly fast on purpose at times...it really buggs me to have to rewind 3-4times just to catch what hes saying... i mean he speaks 3 times faster than any person i ever meet in Hk.. so please Asia 2000 slap him from me!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Pimsleur Cantonese
Rated 5/5

My favorite, even though some locals have pointed out that its "old school" cantonese and most people wont use such speach in everyday life. But to me its THE best for helping with tones.
And eventough it might be outdated i think its easy to listen to, with good topics and its extremley! well narrated.
Drawback is that there is just 1 part avalible, as where japanese, mandarine and so on has 3 parts. And there doesnt seem to be a part 2 anytime soon.

well thats it.
I hope someone can find some use of this.
/Johan

[Sand]

Originally Posted by JohanSWE

The text layout is bad so is the use of fonts, which makes the pages feel very clutterd, and its hard to focus since there is always something on the following page to distract you from the section you should be reading.

/Johan

Maybe you need blinkers. :-)



It goes to show how different people have different opinions.

No sweat cantonese. I didn't like that much.
Pimsleur Cantonese. Good as the initial introduction to the language but as John says, nobody talks like this. So not really useful.


If you are serious about learning you really need to find somebody to help you. And don't be affraid to stop people and ask them what they mean or why they have said something in a particular way.