chinese

Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters
$29.95
I bought this book as a supplement to private tutoring sessions. My teacher had already chosen a book that we had been working from and I was hoping to just use this as a way to more easily remember the characters. While this is a possible approach, I found that the order my teacher wanted to go in and the order that the book presented the characters. This wouldn't have been a problem except that the book's stories very often build off one another.

Additionally, I found the stories for the base radical characters to be difficult to remember. Matthews & Matthews use stories to help you remember which characters make up new words. They also include mythical creatures to help you remember the tones, which is a mediocre method, I think, but good enough. The base radicals, though, get stories about wheels and unicorns, which I just can't place in my mind. I've taken to just looking up non-radical individual characters as my tutor uses them and forgetting about the rest.

Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition
$24.95
This book is useful only if you are taking a Chinese class, not if you are trying to learn on your own.

Beginner's Chinese with 2 Audio CDs
$25.95
This book is best used in a classroom situation. I purchased for independent home study. The speed of the language on the CDs is too fast to understand clearly. The CDs are Chinese only, they are not your typical: speak/repeat format. Not recommened for personal use. Definitely need a tutor or instructor.

Journeys to the East - The River Dragon King (Learn Chinese for Children)
$12.95
We adopted our daughter from China in March 2008 and in December she will be 3. We wanted her to learn Chinese but they don't teach it in our area until she is 5 and we didn't want to wait that long. We ordered Journeys to the East-The River Dragon King and she loves it. It has the numbers, food, body parts,colors and short phrases in Chinese. In the first week of watching the video she has already learned about 6 words. She is even correcting me in the pronunciation of the words. She seems to know the exact dialect of how the words are suppose to be spoken. This is a super video and I hope they come out with more.