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.
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