This web page is currently under construction; it is intended as a resource for English speakers learning Mandarin. It will include information about useful resources such as books, websites, and translators.

The following is an initial list of materials and comments:

Yip Po-Ching and D. Rimmington (2006). Chinese: An Essential Grammar, 2nd ed. Routledge ISBN: 0-415-37261-5. This somewhat expensive paperback is an astonishing tour-de-force, and one of the most interesting, comprehensive, and useful books on language learning ever written. It is an ideal resource, not only for anyone trying to break though from beginner into intermediate levels of Mandarin and beyond, but also for anyone interested in the more intricate structures of all languages. Routledge has also done a beautiful job of the typeset.

Yong Ho, Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary (2002). Hippocrene Books, NY. ISBN: 0-7818-0842-1. A useful book focusing on the 500 most frequently used characters, but unfortunately the information base is largely limited to words in which those characters appear as the first syllable, and this limits the full usefulness of the work.

Ultimate Mandarin Chinese -- Beginner-Intermediate (2004). Living Language, Random House. ISBN: 1-4000-2102-2. [One needs to be careful not to confuse this item with other very similar sounding titles produced by this company.] This is definitely one of the better teach-yourself type of books, but it has very minimal emphasis on the characters.

E. Scurfield and Song Lianyi, Beginner's Chinese. (2003). Teach Yourself, UK. This is one of the better teach-yourself type of books, but it avoids dealing with the characters.

W. McNaughton. (2005). Reading & Writing Chinese (Simplified Character Edition). Tuttle. ISBN: 0-8048-3509-8. Information about this item is forthcoming.

B. Yuan & S.K. Church. (2006). Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary. Oxford. ISBN: 0-19-929853-X. Information about this item is forthcoming.

The Google website: If one clicks on `Language Tools' in Google one can easily obtain useful translations between English and Mandarin. Although it is an extremely valuable site, a significant problem with Google's Chinese translations is that it does not provide the pinyin versions. This is truly a pity because it seems to me that it would be very easy for Google to add this feature.

Pleco: A software offering from Pleco Software, www.pleco.com, whose owner, Michael Love, is quite an interesting character. Without a doubt, when combined with the right handheld device, this software constitutes the best electronic dictionary available on the market today -- and I have tried a lot of them! Beware of devices making claims about `reliable' sentence translation; such claims are all exaggerated -- there ain't no such thing yet, although some devices starting to come out of Taiwan do bear watching. In my opinion, the feature where devices `speak' is not a particularly useful one in the long run.