Title: Essential Chinese 1500
By: Xin Xu
http://www.lulu.com/content/530690
"Essential Chinese 1500" is the book specially designed for
self-directed Chinese language education. The book contains
a collection of 1500 essential Chinese sentences and 1156
essential Chinese words organized into 286 topics. The book
can be used as either a textbook for beginners' self-directed
study or a quick reference manual for intermediate and
advanced level students on topic based usages.
The phonetics system used in this book is called "PinYin",
the phonetics standard in mainland China. Each word and each
sentence in this book are described by unified five pieces
of information: (1). Simplified Chinese, (2). Traditional
Chinese, (3). romanized format PinYin, (4). computer format
PinYin, and (5). English translation. Each topic contains a
stand-alone vocabulary list, thus you can start anywhere
without the dependency on any other topics.