It is a common belief that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn and it needs years of arduous study to just scratch the surface. But such conventional impression and experience no longer holds true with the latest publications of two Chinese educational books authored by Xin Xu: “Essential Chinese 1500” and “Intermediate Chinese 1500”.
Each of these two books contains 1500 conversational Chinese sentences organized into topics. The books can serve both as self-study textbooks and reference manuals on topic based usage. The average sentence lengths are five characters in “Essential Chinese 1500” and eight characters in “Intermediate Chinese 1500”. Both books are self-contained with built-in vocabularies, thus you don't even need a dictionary in order to study the books.
The books are not the mere listing of sentences. The books contain all the information related to each sentence. All the vocabularies appeared in each sentence are clearly described with: (1). Simplified Chinese; (2). Traditional Chinese; (3). Romanized format Pinyin - the Chinese pronunciation system; (4). the computer format Pinyin and, (5). the English translation of the word. Each sentence is presented with (1). Simplified Chinese; (2). Romanized format Pinyin and, (3). the English translation of the sentence.
These two books are the kind that every Chinese language student should have because they are like sentence dictionaries, which are as useful as word dictionaries. With 3000 sentences combined in these two books, you can always find something to say in all imaginable situations and scenarios. Take these two books with you when you travel to China and you will be amazed at how easy it is to look up a sentence you need and actually say it yourself.
The e-book and printed editions of both books are available for purchasing at http://www.lulu.com/xinxu. The e-book previews are free to download.