What are your favorite beginner textbooks for Chinese? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Two recomendations
Short term Spoken Chinese
BJ Language and Culture University Press

Vol1 can't lay my hands on this one for ISBN
Vol 2 isbn 7-5619-1365-6

But I prefer
40 Lessons for Basic Chinese Course
Publ by East China Normal University Press, Shanghai.
ecnupress.com.cn

Vol 1 (first 20 lessons) isbn 7-5617-3103-5/H.209
Vol 2 .....

Haven't used them myself, but the Chinese Made Easier books (1-5) seem to be popular for learning to speak quickly without as much focus on learning Chinese characters.

These are my picks for usefulness and ease of use:

English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries

Chinese to English:

The Contemporary Chinese (Chinese-English Edition)
Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP) ISBN 7-5600-3195-1
At 3,700 pages this is a great reference with 60,00 entries. The radical index is pretty good.

Entries use the "head word" approach and include PINYIN in addition to examples. 100 yuan

English to Chinese: Most EN to CN dictionaries do not have PINYIN in the entries. Both of these do.

English-Chinese Pinyin Dictionary
New World Press, ISBN 9-87800-053832 or 7-80005-383-0
Over 1,700 pages and 23,000 entries. About 100 yuan. Try amazon.cn, they had in in March 2011.

The English-Chinese Pocket Pinyin Dictionary.

New World Press, ISBN 7-80005-44-0
Less than 850 pages and 10,000 entries. Forget the price.

Stroke dictionaries (zidian): If you are going to try to write Hanzi, you need one of these. Entries are single hanzi characters.

Pocket Chinese Dictionary
Foreign Language Press, ISBN 978-7-119-05470-4
Less than 600 pages, 1,700 entries of the most common characters. An English word or two is in each entry. 39 yuan. (I have one with 5,000 characters but no English)

Xiaoxuesheng Biaozhun Zidian,
小学生标准字典
ISBN 7-100-03606-2
About 630 pages, 2,500 entries, no English. 18 yuan

Try Mandarin Books, TsingHua Bookstore, See gokunming listings, or Amazon.cn. Xinhua bookstores are hit or miss.

My favorite beginner textbooks for Chinese:

Short term Spoken Chinese
汉语口语速成
BJ Language and Culture University Press
Levels： Threshold Vol. 1 & 2, Elementary

Fast vocab, some grammar, CDs can also be bought which have the new words and text sections.

Hanyu Jiaocheng
汉语教程
BJ Language and Culture University Press
For the more serious student with more grammar and similar vocab to the Short-Term books above. This series also has 汉语阅读教程 (reading) and 汉语听力教程 (listening)companion books (get these at Mandarin Books or Amazon). CDs come with some books but usually are additional buys. Total for all books (basic, reading and listening) and CDs in this series (three semesters) is less than 600 元.

The schools use these books for their "comprehensive" courses. They are pretty good.

I also like the three book set by Zhang Peng Peng, 张朋朋, his approach is to separate speaking from writing. The first book is Intensive Spoken Chinese. The second, for writing, is The Most Common Chinese Radicals. The third is Rapid Literacy in Chinese, which expands vocab and includes reading. CDs can be found for books other than writing. Zhang Peng Peng also has other books out that are good for self study. See Mandarin Books.

If you want to learn writing, I highly recommend The Most Common Chinese Radicals. You learn 100 basic radicals, characters, by how they are written rather as an add on to a vocab list. These radicals are found in most Chinese words/characters as part of the character or words.

Writing is easier than you think. As my friend Dave points out, Chinese is repetitious.

Whichever books you buy, BE SURE you can get a CD with it. Rip the CD and make mp3 files.

Thanks, all.

Well, my favorite books are "New Practical Chinese Reader", "Short Term Spoken Chinese: Chinese textbook for conversational Chinese", and "Very Good: Spoken Chinese for Beginners". I'm taking online mandarin classes, and I think these books are useful.

_______________________________
masterchinese.com/