Yong Ho's or 3 vol Hai-Tao Tang's Chinese Primer?

[asharpe]

Hi folks,

[ I apologize in advance for the length of this query ]

I'm trying to find some better books to further my Chinese studies. I have been though Pimsleur's 1st course ($300 dollar's worth), and I'm using both a cd course that features Da Shan (televised on CCTV in Beijing) and a multimedia course from the University of Oxford, and I've been to China twice, but I wanted a decent non-computer-based structured book to use as a workbook. I'm ok with canned phrases and short impromptu thoughts using bad grammer, but I'm not very good when I try to build intelligent sentences.

I have just written a letter to Living Language regarding the amount of serious errors in their Ultimate Mandarin Chinese book (2000 edition). I didn't realize it was so bad until recently. I have Yip Po Ching's Basic and Intermediate Grammer books, but I find them difficult because they are quite dry, dense, and there are no topic-centric dialogs. But those are the ones I'm now using. I also have Colloquial Chinese by T'ung and Pollard, but there is only pinyin in it, and I am also interested in learning characters (at least not totally ignoring them).

One set of books I'm now interested in is Yong Ho's Beginning and Intermediate Chinese (ISBNs 078180566X and 0781809924). How beginning is the Beginning book? Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't have any inside contents for them.

Another set of books I'm interested in is the 3 volume set of Hai-Tao Tang (and a bunch of other folks) Chinese Primer (600 pages, ISBN 0691036950). How are these books?

In general, I like the coverage, presentation, and density (how much is covered in each lesson) of that damned Ultimate Mandarin Course, but since I've found 5 errors in 9 chapters myself (as a beginning student!), I'm wondering how much I've now learned from that book that is incorrect. If you are curious, I can post the errors I've found.

Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.

Andrew

[asharpe]

Well, since I wrote so disparagingly about Living Language, I thought it only fair to report that they sent me the newer edition of the Ultimate Mandarin Chinese, absolutely free of charge. This impresses me quite a lot. The new edition still has errors, but there are less of them (I think, and hope).

I also decided to buy the Yong Ho set of books (because of the price, mostly). I will receive them in a week or so, and I'll let you know what I find.

Andrew