Beginner Book

[Scarlet]

I know around 500-750 words and would like to build my vocabulary up. Are there any good elementary level books? I would prefer if they had pinyin & english translation too. I am not very good at looking up words in the dictionary

[Susanna]

《elementary spoken chinese》2, for students about 500 words

peking university press

[RobAnt]

You can't get much more basic than Chinese for Dummies. There's even a companion phrasebook.

I'm actually finding it quite useful.

Oh yes, forgot to mention, the Chinese referred to here is Mandarin (putonghua).

[gato]

That sounds like a ripoff of the Complete Idiot's Guide to Chinese.

How about trying these joke books for beginners:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=105714#post105714

Wit and Humor: An Easy Chinese Reading Series: A Simple But Difficult Problem (with CD)

简易汉语趣味阅读－简单的难题

[Scarlet]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

That Wit and Humor book looks quite interesting. I'm going to look into that

[Scarlet]

I noticed it's alot easier to get books in simplified characters. I guess I should just study that instead?

I been doing both traditional & simplified for now, but I have to go out of my way just to study traditional. While traditional is harder, I think it looks better

Anyway, I decided to get this book

http://www.chinabooks.com/cart/product.php?productid=18841&cat=140&page=1