This user-friendly guide to the basics helps you learn how to speak Chinese quickly and easily by drawing parallels with something you already know—English.

Chinese is a fascinating language that can seem impossibly difficult to learn at first, but is relatively easy if you focus on the spoken aspect. This revised edition contains new dialogues, cultural notes, IT and social media vocabulary, and new manga illustrations.

This book is designed for everyone who wants to learn to speak and understand colloquial Chinese—whether it is for business, pleasure, or travel to China. A lighthearted guide that brings Chinese to life in a down-to-earth fashion, Mandarin Chinese for Beginners makes language learning fun.

• Real-life dialogues and situations help you to converse with confidence
• Sentence pattern exercises and drills help to reinforce what you are learning
• Native-speaker audio recordings enable you to pronounce Chinese vocabulary accurately
• Interesting notes, idioms, sayings and poems introduce you to Chinese culture

Mandarin Chinese for Beginners contains lots of extra hints and tips drawn from the authors' many years of experience in teaching the language to foreigners. Answer keys for the exercises are provided, and an "Extend Your Vocabulary" section in each chapter helps you to remember and understand more words that you'd think possible.