"Essential Chinese 1500", authored by Xin Xu, is the book specially designed for self directed study of Chinese language. The book teaches thousands of commonly used Chinese words and sentences in China’s official Mandarin dialect, China’s official standard Pinyin phonetics and written expressions of each word in both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
The book contains a collection of 1500 essential Chinese sentences and 1176 essential Chinese words organized into 286 topics involving the use of 828 commonly used Chinese characters. The book can be used either as a self-study textbook for beginners or a quick reference manual for intermediate and advanced level students and travelers seeking a usage by topic.
Sentences in this book are short, expressive and representative. The average length of sentences is five characters. The contents of the book are organized into conceptual topics. Each topic section contains a vocabulary list and a sentence list. The vocabulary list in each topic is stand-alone; thus you can start anywhere without any dependence on earlier topics.
By studying this book, your Chinese language learning process can be significantly shortened and simplified. By creatively varying, combining and applying the thousands of primitive words and sentences covered in this book, you can construct an unlimited number of new, compound and complex sentences. You will quickly gain confidence in understanding and speaking Chinese; you can even impress Chinese speakers and gain quick respect and friendship from them.
The E-Book version of the second edition of this book is currently available for downloading at http://www.lulu.com/xinxu at the price of US$20. The preview of the book is available for free downloading at http://www.lulu.com/xinxu. The paperback version of the first edition is available for purchasing at http://www.amazon.com at the price of US$47. The audio edition of the book and its sequel “Intermediate Chinese 1500” will be available soon.