Titles in Barron's Easy Way series are self-teaching manuals that cover a wide range of subjects and skills. Among them are several language-learning books for beginners. This second edition of Mandarin Chinese the Easy Way comes with an audio compact disc that supplements the book, providing pronunciation help and listening comprehension material in the form of spoken dialogues. This book-and-CD combination introduces basic sentence patterns and practical vocabulary by dramatizing many true-to-life and often humorous conversational situations in Mandarin Chinese. An introduction to Chinese written characters is presented in the book's final chapter.

This little village, called by some a paradise, had four names prior to Calvin Read naming it Mandarin for a type of citrus fruit in 1830. Until the freezes of the late 1800s, the citrus industry was the most important driver in the local economy. Timber, turpentine, and farming also provided income and work for families in the area. Mandarin has boasted several outstanding individuals, but one person stands out above the rest--Harriet Beecher Stowe. She and her husband, Calvin, bought property along the St. Johns River in 1867 and wintered there until 1884, making many positive impacts on the community, including the establishment of a school for Black and white children and an Episcopal church. In the 20th century, remarkable figures include Charles M. "Charlie" Brown, a famous potter and lifelong resident of Mandarin, and world-class pianist and composer Hans Barth.

Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language-a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar-became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones-the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning-is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them. In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely, perhaps, than it has ever been before.