Pack CD Chinese 2 with Ease (Book + CDs): Chinese 2 Self-Learning Method 0th Edition

I highly recommend language learning fellows this book, it helps a lot. You will be able to communicate as soon as you finish reading it. Do not forget to buy the volume one as well.

Love the Cd's that come with this package.

Very, very nice starter book.I have both volumes 1 and also V2. It's nice, the way Assimil takes you step by step through learning Mandarin, without any boring grammer emphasis.Assimil books are nice for accumulating a lot of words and sentences, in a pretty interesting, low pressure way.A word of advice, definitely get audio recording of the dialogues. Either buy the audio or get a native speaker to record it for you, but never attempt to learn Mandarin Chinese without accompanying audio, no matter what course you follow, always have the audio. Learning a tonal language without a lot of audio is impossible. It's a fruitless endeavor.I have 2 small complaints. Even though this is a QUALITY product, they made quite a lot of mistakes with the tone marks, in the ping yin. About 9% of the tone marks are incorrect in both V 1 and V 2. Be conscious of that. As a beginner, that is confusing.The 2nd small complaint is, don't fall too much for the false advertising of being at a B2 level, after completing V2. Well, you might know a lot of B2 level vocab. That's semi true. These books will nicely help you build a foundation, but to spontaneously SPEAK at B2 level Chinese will take A LOT of ongoing effort.Very recommended you get these 2 volumes. There is a lot of junk out there, but these books are excellent. Despite the errors in PingYin, I'll still give it 5 stars because this is such a great resource. It's very rare to find something where you can learn a lot of vocab and grammer in an interesting way. This delivers in that area. Yeah, it's a little pricey, but this resource could be the difference between failure and success in Chinese. Why? Because it moves you through it quite pain free and the layout of the book is very user friendly.If you start with the wrong resource, it could backfire and make you give up. This book will support your endeavor, in a user friendly manner.Also, Living Language Box Complete Edition Mandarin, is a decent product also.

I've used Assimil for other languages and think it's simply the most effective self-teaching method out there. Another reviewer noted that Assimil Chinese isn't up to their usual standards, and that's correct. Bottom line: if you're just starting to learn Chinese, I'd still recommend you use Assimil.As with all its languages, Assimil organizes its Chinese book by dialogues. You "assimilate" grammar and vocabulary by absorbing whole sentences right from the beginning, first by reading through the dialogues and then, in a so-called active phase, by trying to convert the English translations back into the original Chinese. Grammar points are elaborated on in the footnotes, and you're asked to spend at least 15 minutes every day (yes, every single day) with the course. If you can, I'd recommend trying to fit at least two lessons in per day, but it's the principle of daily study that's most important. If you can't commit the 15+ minutes per day, Assimil may disappoint you.If you start with no Chinese at all, what can you expect after you're done with Books 1 and 2, assuming you follow the Assimil system to the letter? Your mileage may vary, but you will probably have an upper intermediate grasp of grammar, and will have been exposed to around 1,400 commonly used words. You'll be able to proceed to Schaum's Chinese Grammar (a great resource) and be familiar with 80-90 percent of it, with the rest easily digestible. You'll also be able to tackle Schaum's Chinese Vocabulary, which assumes familiarity with intermediate grammar. Will you have further to go? Sure, but your foundation should be really strong; and proficiency will no longer seem like an unattainable dream.This also assumes you hold off on learning Chinese characters. The resources above all use both pinyin and hanzi. If time and motivation is a factor, as it probably is, I recommend using pinyin for as long as you can. Assimil also has a Chinese writing book, which teaches you how to write characters in the order they appear in the course dialogues. It's an interesting approach, because you learn the characters in the context of dialogues you already know. But again, things will go much faster if you stick to pinyin for a while.Why only three stars? Every book I've seen that transcribes into pinyin has the occasional tone misprint, but Assimil Chinese, especially Book 2, is littered with these. Things like the negative "bu" being written as "bu3," for instance. The first book looks to be better, and you should be able to catch most typos by the time you get to Book 2, but they just did a terrible job with the pinyin. You could also argue they could have fit a bit more into the course without overwhelming the reader.As for the CDs, I thought the recordings were fine and was able to transfer the tracks to a computer and iPod.

The Assimil products are great but, I received this product with a broken cover, scratched book, the CDs were out of their sleeves and also scratched.

Arrived earlier than expected and love the book quality. thank you!

This is the second volume of the two-book Chinese pack. Before beginning this I was already a fan of Assimil courses having used their Dutch course successfully. So I had high expectations of the Chinese course and for the most part have been very impressed after working through book 1.For those who aren't familiar with Assimil's methods, you get a daily lesson with a conversation and some exercises which are also recorded on the CDs. The conversations are quirky and often humorous which helps in remembering them. You definitely need the CDs, don't even bother trying to study without the audio, it's essential to listen constantly to recordings of native speakers when learning a language.Each lesson introduces some new words, which will keep popping up in subsequent lessons and this helps to remember them. The difficulty level builds up in a gradual way that doesn't become overwhelming and the notes explain key points of the language very clearly.They claim that you only need to study half an hour a day but I find it tends to stretch into an hour to cover the material properly, plus additional time spent listening to the audio material while driving or walking about which I don't really count. But this method works, if you follow this course diligently you will learn a very useful amount of language in a relatively short time.I would have rated this 5 stars, but for one thing only - the book contains many mistaken tone markings. It's annoying, but if you've worked through book 1 then you should be able to catch most of them. Even with this reservation, I would still recommend Assimil, it is in my experience the best language learning method available.