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.