Good for everyday speaking, October 7, 2002

While I agree with the other reviews of the book that this is a very accessible text for learning to speak Chinese, I feel I must mention that it doesn't provide most of the Chinese characters for the words, instead only writing them in pinyin. This is adequate for those who are learning to speak Chinese and want to gain fluency in everyday speaking and grammar use, but I did find it frustrating that I had to look elsewhere for the characters. Additionally, I do feel that it would be easier to learn some vocabulary with the Chinese characters - for example the word for flowers, huar, is given, and the word for garden, huaryuan. Are they related? Is it the same root word? Without the character, there is no way to know.

That criticism aside, I do feel that Chinese in 10 Minutes a Day has been very helpful in learning to speak Chinese. It provides a great deal of everyday vocabulary from around the town and house, and presents it in a fun format. It comes complete with stickers to label everyday objects in your house, for example, which act as a constant reminder as to the Chinese words.

I definately recommend this book, with the addition of a good dictionary for the student interested in learning Chinese characters.

Could use: Audio & characters...that being said this can easily be augmented by using Rosetta Stone's online free lessons to get the idea of tones and pronunciations and lots of websites have characters you can look up.

Summary: I love it. I've used other do-it-yourself language books and gotten bored. The colour, "activities" and tips make this book motivating and it is perfect for the raw beginner.

Excellent introduction for travellers, July 12, 2004
Reviewer: A reader
Before buying (or reviewing) a language instruction book, you should consider the purpose of the book. This book intends to give you some basic speaking ability in Chinese in a relatively short amount of time, to help you express yourself while traveling, shopping, eating, and doing other typical tourist activities. It does an excellent job of that. If you're looking for more than that, choose a book that better meets your needs.

The book is divided into 24 lessons, with the suggestion you study each one for 10 minutes. That's just 4 hours of study, plus however much time you want to spend practicing. This won't make you fluent, won't teach you to read/write characters, and it won't really help you understand someone speaking Chinese to you, but it will give you the basic speaking skills it aims to provide.

There are flash cards to cut out and practice with, and sticky labels to put on things around your house. The words are written in Pinyin, which is a romanization of Mandarin words based on their pronunciation. Pinyin pronunciation isn't obvious to English readers, so the book includes additional phonetic spelling. For example, it tells you the PinYin word 'jie' is pronounced 'jee-eh'.

There are a number of exercises so you can practice what you've learned, which helps you remember.

If you'd like to build a good foundation of common Chinese words and phrases with a minimal amount of study time, then I think you'll be happy with this book.

2.5 on a scale of 1-5, March 31, 2004
Reviewer: A reader
This book is basically a glorified list of vocabulary words. There are no conversations and very few sentences in the book. It doesn't teach much grammar, and seems to encourage using Chinese words with English sentence structures. If this were my only text, it would be very bad, but I'm finding it useful as a suplemetal text. The labels, pictures, and flash cards are all useful, but only when used in conjunction with a course or other book that actually teaches the language, not just the words.

quick way to learn common chinese, August 2, 2003

My boyfriend and I are going to be moving to China next year, and since he knows absolutely no Chinese I thought this book would be helpful. Now our whole house is labeled with stickers, and it is working. Its a pretty quick and easy way to learn, I just wish it had the charecters as well.

Somewhat useful, but lacks audio, May 8, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
The system is a pretty good one. There are lots of pictures, pages to help you practice saying and writing the words, etc. The idea of doing just a little bit each day is a good one. Unfortunately, there is no audio tape. Audio is always so important for pronounciation, but this is even more true with Chinese where tones are critical to the word's meaning. I would not recommend this book for that reason.