Are you sick of the boring old textbooks that simply give you informative info and bland exercises to practice what you’ve learned? If you are trying to learn Chinese and want to make things a little more exciting, then the book Learn Chinese the Fast and Fun Way might just catch your eye.
“Fun” and “interesting” books are normally reserved for children, but that doesn’t mean teen and adult learners want everything dry and boring. Learn Chinese the Fast and Fun Way sounds like a solution to your everyday student boredom, but is it? The book starts out with a basic sound guideline to help you learn how to pronounce the Romanization of each Chinese word in the book. Then the book continues on to various topical units. Though this may sound like the same structure as every other book, the content and tone of the instructional sections is a bit different. With cute little illustrations, the bland vocabulary lists are slightly more engaging. These pictures also help you to make a visual association with each word, further impressing it into your mind. The other great thing is that the answers to various exercises are often on the same page. Other books usually have an answer key at the end, which can be annoying to search for every time.
"With cute little illustrations, the bland vocabulary lists are slightly more engaging. These pictures also help you to make a visual association with each word, further impressing it into your mind."
As with many books, the units have standard dialogues to read over. Truthfully, there isn’t that much different or “fun” about the dialogue in comparison to other books to learn Chinese. For a book that claims to be so “fun” that it uses the word in its title, we expect a bit more. After the dialogue, there are some standard exercises. Along with these, the book includes some word searches and puzzles to break the monotony. While I’m all for word searches, there’s not much creativity or thought behind including such exercises. Again, a book that calls its self “Learn Chinese the Fast and Fun Way” merits a little more distinction and effort by the authors.
To be honest, the only thing “fun” about the book is the illustrations, and they aren’t even that great. They are mere line drawings that are just a step above clip art. The most interesting lesson is probably reading time. The student is presented with clocks and has to write the time in Chinese. But is this really all that creative? Most language teachers have given their students similar worksheets at some point in time.
This book may be helpful for people who are just trying to learn enough Chinese to get by a trip or a slightly extended stay in China. If you just want to learn some basic communication, then this book may be light and engaging enough to get you to stay dedicated to learning that much Chinese. This book is really not meaty enough for a Chinese teacher to use with his/her students in the classroom. All in all, this book only serves the purpose of teaching surface level Chinese to the casual student.
