Working Through Chinese Made Easy 2
I picked up the second volume of the Chinese Made Easy 2 series when I was trying to move past absolute beginner material. It was sitting in a used bookstore in Taipei, and I grabbed it because the grammar explanations were clearer than the alternatives I'd been flipping through at the time. That was about five years ago. The book is part of a longer series designed for college-level learners who need practical conversation skills fast. It assumes you've already memorized pinyin and the basic surnames from volume one. Volume two picks up where that leaves off, which means if you're starting cold, you're going to struggle on page one anyway. The book doesn't bother with a comprehensive pinyin refresher. It just moves forward.
What Chinese Made Easy 2 Actually Covers
The grammar progression is fairly standard for this type of textbook. You get the basic resultative complements early on — the construction, directionals like and attached to verbs, the structure introduced gradually rather than all at once. The vocabulary is built around daily life situations: shopping, giving directions, making appointments, talking about your schedule. Not thrilling stuff, but functional. Each lesson follows the same structure. A dialogue with pinyin and English translation, a vocabulary list, grammar notes in English, and exercises at the end. The dialogues are the weakest part. They read like they were written by someone who knows what correct Chinese sounds like but hasn't had a real conversation in a month. The grammar explanations, though, are solid. They don't waste your time with linguistic jargon. You get a rule, a few examples, and then you move on. I ran into a specific issue halfway through the book that almost made me toss it. The section on — degree complements — has an example using that implies it works with any adjective, but the practice sentences contradict that. One exercise has , which is correct, but another pair of exercises uses , which is wrong. Native speakers don't say that. doesn't take as a complement. I spent about ten minutes cross-checking with my audio files and a couple of forum threads before realizing the textbook authors mixed up two different exercise sets. It's a small error, but it confused me enough that I stopped trusting the answer key for a while. I started verifying everything against the accompanying audio CD instead, which was more reliable than the text answers in those sections.
The audio is worth something here. The recording quality isn't studio-grade, but the speakers articulate each sentence clearly, and they repeat the key structures enough times that you get a sense of the rhythm. Listen to the dialogues three or four times before looking at the text. That's how I use it, and it sticks better than reading first and then listening. One thing the book doesn't emphasize enough is the difference between written and spoken form in the vocabulary lists. Some words in the lexicon are formal register — , , — and they appear in the grammar notes as if they're interchangeable in casual speech. They aren't. If you use in a conversation with a native speaker, you sound like you're reading a news report. The book mentions register in passing but never builds exercises around it. That's a gap you have to fill yourself. I supplemented with some podcast listening after that, mainly because I needed to hear these words used in actual contexts where the formality level mattered. The exercises are straightforward. Fill in the blank, rearrange the sentence, match the Chinese to the English. They're not difficult, but they're also not particularly creative. You'll be doing the same structural drills for three or four lessons in a row. It works for drilling, but it won't teach you to think in Chinese. If your goal is conversation, you need to pair this with something that forces you to produce language rather than manipulate it on paper.
Get the Full Details
Chinese Made Easy 2 costs around thirty dollars new and less than ten used. The companion workbook is available separately and adds a few pages of writing practice. Not essential, but it gives you something to do besides the multiple-choice exercises. The series also has an online component now, though the website is outdated and most of the links are broken. Don't count on it. The main limitation of this book is that it assumes a classroom environment. There's no self-study guide, no video lessons, no app integration beyond the audio files. If you're working through it alone, you'll need to find a language partner or tutor to check your pronunciation and give you feedback on the spoken drills. The book will get you to an intermediate level in about fourteen weeks if you put in the time, but it won't do the speaking practice for you. That part always requires another person or another tool. I'd recommend it for someone who's finished volume one and wants to keep moving without switching to a different series. It's not the most exciting textbook out there, and it has a few errors you'll need to work around, but the grammar section alone makes it worth the price. Just don't treat the answer key as gospel and listen to the audio before you read the text.
