Considering what a difficult language (at least in my opinion) Chinese is to learn, this book is good at breaking down the basics into small bits that are rather easy for me to absorb.
That being said, I started out learning this language with quite a disadvantage. I have Asperger’s, or as they call it now, high functioning autism. I have much more difficulty taking in and understanding things verbally rather than visually. For that reason, I highly prefer learning through textbooks than other methods. However, there is no shortcut to learning to speak a language without at least spending some time listening to it. To make things more ‘fun’, Chinese is a tonal language. My greatest fear that this will lead to a lot of trouble as I try to speak. I hate to offend anyone in ANY language. But what complicates things more is the scripts. These thousands of characters need to be memorized. There IS pinyin – a romanized form – but even that is phonetically unreliable. And everyday Chinese doesn’t use pinyin.
However, one needs to use some sort of written script to learn this language thoroughly. This book uses pinyin to help you at least understand how the different tones work. Here’s a sample of today’s practice.
Polyglot in Progress 