Good book from a Chinese student point
599142
The author of this book had a very good observation and reasonable argument. Actually, I believe that is the strength of America. Information flows so fast and I can get this book from library for free. After solving the basic problem of living, China has to go the America way to stimulate creativity and gracious.
3407122
The material in the textbook is helpful and easy to understand for Chinese language learners. However, supplementary information such as character stroke order would make the learning experience more comprehensive.
3878357
I read this good book, here in Brazil. This book is good, easy to read and concise about China today. Even so, I must give four stars for this book, because it doesn't has enough text, about ethnic minorities in China and democracy's possibilities in China. Ethnic minorities in China are the non-Han Chinese population in the China. China officially recognizes 55 ethnic minority groups within China in addition to the Han majority. Even more, there's nothing about members of unrecognized(by Chinese government) ethnic groups, such as Chinese Jews, Oirat, Ili Turki, etc.
My congratulations to the Chinese government, because they did the right thing for China's growth, since 1978. I live in Brazil. My country losts thirty years of growth, while Chine made the biggest growing in human's history in these same thirty years.
3942816
"A Year Without Made In China", As you could probably guess from the title, is about a family struggling to go a whole year without purchasing anything manufactured in China.  The odds are against them as their young children constantly push for the forbidden Chinese merchandise that permeates every corner of the market.

This book was read for my college globalization class, and because of this, I tended to be somewhat critical of the lack of solid content within it.  The book was a bit casual, with not many statistics to back up her claims- A lot of research is left up to the reader to verify or disclaim what is presented.  However, after reading Sara Bongiorni's account of the year of no Chinese products I realized that this book is not advertised as nor is it meant to be a scholarly source for research on this subject.

What it did do, though is spark my interest to do my own research and find out a lot more out about the issue of China "invading" America's markets. This is why I have given this book 4 stars- because all though it does not provide many statistics or research, it creates a curiosity in the reader to go and find these things out for themselves, which in itself is an accomplishment.
1585317
This is an interesting and somewhat funny story from the mindset of a Chinese man. There are some grammar issues but I still enjoyed what I read, and came away with some perspective from his point of view. I volunteered to review an advance copy.
4145403
I thought this book was very well done.  It included the Kuen Kuet or Ving Tsun Idioms, the 3 Fist Forms, some Basic Dim Mak information and a buch of fun Chinese sayings on the bottom of each page.  The pictures were very good, except when it came to application, the pictures seemed a bit confusing.  But that could be the case of many Martial Arts books.  It lists most of the major principles and the basic concepts which was very well laid out.

I just hope that the last part of the system - the Wooden Dummy, The Pole Form, and the Knife form will be represented in another part.  This is the main reason I gave it one less star.  It cannot be THE Wing Chun Compendium if it does not have the WHOLE System.
2438398
I have been studying Mandarin for a little over 2 years. I first learned about this book through the author's blog, Laowai Chinese, which I visit often. As soon as the book was out, I ordered it.

I am very happy with it - it provides lots of advice and tips to improve your learning experience. As the first reviewer, I also disagree with the point about concentrating on pinyin instead of Hanzi - I find that Chinese is not Chinese without the ideograms, but maybe it is a good way to start. However, I admit that when I started trying to learn Chinese on my own, I decided to only use pinyin because tacking the ideograms seemed at first too overwhelming a task. At some point, though, you do realize that you need to take a deep breath and go for it.

If you are interested in learning Mandarin, or if you have been studying for a while, I advise you to buy this book. It is fun to read, Albert tells lots of stories about his experiences living in China, how he struggled with the tones, it gives a lot of hope for those of us STILL struggling.

He is a very insightful person, I am learning a lot about the Chinese culture through his book.
4394755
It is a sound textbook, but the lesson content seem to be for learners who live in China. It doesn't suit my students who are in the U.S.
1312457
Nowadays there are many publications about China by various authors but most readers when come across such books fall into a fasinating trap. This is to say while the authors themselves often feel they are fasinated by China's rise, Chinese people and their culture, what they write down there though often make people feel irrelevant due a lack of sufficent context and references for non-Chinese readers.

It's not like reading about Russia or Israel. True they are also foreign countries and people but the cultural background concerned still fall into the overall Western civilization and therefore makes the framework at least bit easier to access for western readers.

But China as we know is totally different. I therefore really appreciate the creative and enlightening angle this book "Decoding the Dragon's Mindset" takes in bridging peopel to a reviving ancient civilization and its tomorrow. Amazingly it explains the Chinese mentality via a model we get used to come along here in the West with specific cross-cultural stories and experiences. During the reading of the book, for the first time ever I feel as an average reader I am getting "closer" by heart and mind to another mindset and culture. It's quite a fresh and good feeling!

Recently in a high-level Strategic and Economic US-China Forum held in Washington DC July 2009, President Obama announced that the US and China together will shape the 21st century. He is trying to put us ahead of the trend, isn't he? Meanwhile I can't help noticing many folks in the media or online discussions still show obsolete or confused views regarding China, its culture, US-China relations, and the world trend. The issue, in my opinion, is due to some old sterotype still haunting us in mind.

Guess time to start absorbing in and adapting to new ideas by reading such new books as this "Decoding the Dragon's Mindset". While it's a hot choice for individual readers, I won't be surprised this book will also become a valuable guideline level reference for schools or training centers with regards to better understanding Chinese and China in the new century.
829951
I read this right before traveling to China.  It gives a good perspective on some basic aspects of modern day Chinese culture.  Change has come so quickly and so significantly in the past 30 years or so. This book helps one make some sense of their priorities and hang-ups.
4902299
Initially, I was bowled over by this book.  After a year spent teaching English in China, fellow foreign teachers (many of whom had studied China and Chinese for years) and I realized how self-serving the book is.  Salzman frequently compliments himself in terms of his fluency in Chinese--of course, there is no way for the reader to get any sense whether his perception is correct!  Most foreigners find fluency extremely difficult to obtain.  Furthermore, Salzman indicates that many Chinese found him to be quite special--never mind that he wrote in an era when any American (let alone one studying martial arts) in China would be considered very "exotic."  Once I realized these central problems in the book, they undermined my trust in his perceptions.  (For example, does anyone else think his description of biking with the young Chinese woman is a bit creepy?)
2389268
I am using this book as the textbook for my Chinese Linguistics course. I found it very accessible to students who have no linguistics background at all. The introduction is "jargon-free" and fun. It is a good way to introduce the Chinese language and culture to students who have not studied Chinese or who have had very little Chinese training. But for students who have had at least a year's worth of Chinese classes, some of the chapters seem not enough for them. Such students probably benefit more from materials that are more in-depth. But for the targeted readership of this book, it is very well written and engaging. So I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in knowing the structure, the writing system and history of the Chinese language.
4418595
After reading the other reviews regarding "How the Chinese really speak", I asked my instructor what he thought.

He explained that the communists forced unwelcomed changes to the Chinese language and it is because of communist rule that people don't speak exactly this way anymore. One example he mentioned is that communists demanded that the word for "girlfriend" also be word for "wife". He believes times are changing and the culture is slowly re-embracing the original ways of speaking Chinese.  I am not an expert in Chinese affairs so I am not able to comment either way on that issue.

For me, the book is well structured and easy to follow but I've only covered the first 2 chapters. My instructor has been teaching Chinese for 35 years and he's had his copy for at least 15 years. He highly recommends this book. He knows more than I do so I'll stick to what he suggests.
951143
I recently went to China for a few weeks to teach English, and found that after a little bit of study with this book I could easily recognize the basic characters for such handy words as entrance, man, woman, Beijing, etc. But my work really paid off when a friend and I got lost on top of the Great Wall in a sea of Chinese people, none of whom spoke English (how one gets lost on top of a wall is another story altogether!). Anyway, I knew the characters for exit and after I sketched them out on a piece of paper a helpful man pointed us in the right direction. I really liked being able to interpret the otherwise undecipherable scribbles that are everywhere in China. This book was well worth the modest price.
1302489
The lessons are fairly short, rare for Chinese texts. The readings are varied. The cultural insights are valuable. I like it.
1735386
Preamble: Every one of us speaks from one's cultural and ethnic self, either knowingly or, more often than not, unknowingly.

Just watched -- more than once -- the TV series on DVD from UK. Highly recommended as food for thought. I am not ethnic West Western, but I am quite alright with thinking out of my ethno-cultural self, and be self-critical at times.

On that page where Professor Ferguson writes "... with their bewildering 431,286 characters to be memorized, ...", it is not clear to me whether he is referring to the number of characters contained in the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism, or whether he is referring to the entire repertoire of Chinese characters. As I understand, the total number of Chinese characters, including variant forms of the same characters and obsolete characters, is around 50,000 to 60,000 (fifty to sixty thousand). I am a Cantonese-speaking Chinese brought up in Hong Kong up to university level, so should know something about the language which would seem daunting to understand for non-Chinese speakers.

Written Chinese characters may be a unifying force uniting the diverse dialectal differences on the vast China land mass. That is the view of the contemporary Chinese aesthetician Li Zehou. Li also points out that written Chinese characters, one of his three source codes of Chinese culture, have served to ensure the continuity of Chinese civilisation. Chinese characters are not phonetic symbols, but ideographic entities. That is where Chinese characters' uniqueness lies (Cf. Li's essay in Chinese, Ming Pao Monthly, v. 40, no. 9, September 2005, p. 78-81).

And here we are talking about the traditional full Chinese characters, not simplified Chinese. These full Chinese characters, written or printed vertically in columns from right to left, have been the basis of the development of Chinese culture and history since their rudimentary beginnings as the oracle bone characters found on tortoise shells or shoulder bones of big animals. I am not sure, though, whether our characters have improved or retarded the advancement of Chinese civilisation. To be a literate Chinese person, learning a few thousand characters is all that is needed.

And another uniqueness of Chinese is that there is no tense structure as such, nor any inflections to be memorised or spelt correctly.

Incidentally and ironically, appreciation of the verticality of written Chinese comes from Japan, not from China (Cf. chapter 3 of Ishikawa Kyuyo's book, translated as "Taction: The Drama of the Stylus in Oriental Calligraphy" by Waku Miller, 2011).

Changing from the vertical text direction to the Western horizontal direction for alphabetically structured scripts is a good example of the need or fashion to copy the West. Yet clearly this demonstrates the versatility and adaptability of Chinese characters. Our verticality has not become extinct like some species in the animal kingdom. Vertical text is still widely used in Japan and some places in the world.
4192988
I really enjoyed this book by Teresa Wright. Se is very knowledged about Chinese history and politics and she explains the issues in a way that is easy for a reader to comprehend. The book covers the most important topics of political and cultural relations in China and is a good read as a text book or for someone with personal interest towards global issues.