Chinese Breeze - Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Chinese Edition)

I have been studying the Chinese language for around 2 years now and have advanced beyond the usefulness of most Chinese books and software for teaching beginners. If you have also reached this stage, the "Chinese Breeze" series is the best thing you can do to take your Chinese reading ability to the next level.As other reviewers pointed out, these books are not suitable for true beginners who are just starting to learn Chinese, as nearly the entire book is written in Chinese characters. Each story in the series is written using a vocabulary of around 300 words. As someone who has studied Chinese at a leisurely pace for around 2 years, I would say I can read about 95% of the content in the "Chinese Breeze" series. Words that a beginner probably wouldn't know, such as specialized terms dealing with banking, computers, etc. are written at the bottom of the page in Hanyu, Pinyin, and English. At the back of each book is a vocabulary index and a quiz, where you can check your understanding of each chapter.Probably my only complaint with these books is the included audio. The Chinese people who are reading the story are speaking way too fast for my ears. Each CD included 2 sets of mp3 audio files, a "normal" version and a "slow" version. In my opinion, The "slow" version is still spoken way too rapidly for anyone who is still in the beginning stages of learning Chinese.

To begin with the story in this book is a lot of fun. Unfortunately for me, my goal in getting the book was to learn how to read Chinese characters. The book itself does not have many of the words defined, but I discovered a neat trick. I could go to the MDBG Chinese Dictionary web site and copy paragraphs of the book into that site. Then I could view the Chinese in the book and the translations of the words side by side. I was learning to read at a very rapid rate until I made it into the middle of Chapter 2 at which point I hit the publisher copy limit. Now if any of you have tried to look up a word in a Chinese dictionary, you realize you don't want to look up a lot of them. The language just does not lend itself well to dictionary look up. It is a shame as I was having quite a bit of fun. Until I hit the limit I was planning on buying the rest of the books in the series and recommending it to others. At this point, though I would not recommend the book to learn the characters, although it still might be a fun read once you know them. For learning the characters you would be better off finding a source with a more liberal copying policy. If they ever came out with a version of this book with characters and pingyin+English side by side, I would definitely get it.

This was the first Chinese Breeze work that I read and I enjoyed it. This is an original story, not an adaptation (BTW, there is nothing wrong with adaptations. I love what Mandarin Companion is doing too). I'm impressed with Chinese Breeze's plan to write up to eight levels of graded readers. Reading a story is a nice departure from studying a dialogue to improve in a foreign language. "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" also gives a glimpse into modern Chinese society with this elementary level "whodunit?" It was a bit predictable not too far into the story, but that's OK, I'm trying to learn Chinese, not play "Clue".I"m currently reading "Can I Dance with You?" and also read "I Really Want to Find Her" not too long ago.The audio CD is also helpful to listen to. I try to read a chapter once or twice before listening to the CD at the slower pace. I also recommend using the review questions when you finish a chapter to further reinforce your comprehension.Currently only three levels are in publication, but I have it on good authority that level four with have a couple of titles out in the mid 2015 time frame. Good job, Chinese Breeze! 汉语凤，加油！

This is on the easy side for a graded reader, so if you're looking for an introductory book, it's not a bad way to go. I think there are probably better ones out there though - I found some of this one exceedingly repetitive (even for a graded reader), and also I found the fast transitions between the main story and a little side-story pretty jarring ... it was just weird to go from thinking about murder in one sentence then musing on getting a girlfriend in the next.I don't know about the paper version with the CD, but if you get the Kindle edition I think there are some drawbacks. One of my primary complaints is that the vocabulary lists don't contain pinyin, just the characters and the definition. When I learn a new word, I'd like to not have to go write the character into a dictionary to learn how to say it, and of course with the Kindle edition there is no audio. Also, I don't know about the paper version but certainly I think in the Kindle version the illustrations don't turn out very well, and don't add much to the story.Upshot: not the best one out there, but not too bad if you are looking for bulk graded readers. For better quality, though, if you're going Kindle, I would go with the Mandarin Companion ones.

I've read two chapters so far. Been learning Chinese for about 6 months... the first chapter, I was able to read 90% give or take 3% without the audio... The audio is awesome, but you might want to play it with a player with speed option to slow it down a bit for the first few times since it is quite fast pased. The VLC player which you can download for free worked great for me, and the shortcut keys for playback speed are:[ key for slowing down] for speeding upThe audio is really helpful for the shadowing method. You can read the characters following the audio by a second or less behind. This method is supposed to help with your pronunciation. The book uses the Beijing method with the "er" endings say for "zhe er" for here instead of "zhe li" which is fine, because I can fix that on my own.

the headline sums it up. It was what i expected