Psych. Here’s what’s true about the post heading. The Lazy Bastard Guide to Mandarin is in fact the ninth best-selling Kindle ebook in the Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Reference > Foreign Language > Instruction > Chinese category.
Top 100 Paid
- This Is China: The First 5,000 Years (This World of Ours) by Haiwang Yuan
- Chinese for Everyone (Chinese for Everyone (Ebook)) by Janie Chien
- Learn How to Speak and Understand Mandarin Chinese in 30 Days: A Revolutionary Chinese Language Learning Approach for Begi… by Mike Sin
- The Most Basic Chinese – All You Need to Know to Get By (Most Basic Languages) by James McGlasson
- Tips for Learning Chinese: A Beginner’s Guide by Rui Zhi Dong
- Chinese characters from HSK level 1 with stroke order by Virgilio Krumbacher
- Knee Howdy: Challenge Chinese Vocabulary to a Duel and Bury it ‘Six Feet Under’ inside your Brain! by Nathan Cain
- Learn to Speak Chinese IV: Practical Living (Visit the Doctor, Dentist, Shopkeeper, Chef, Tailor, Trainer, and Lost & Found… by Suzanne Brickman
- The Lazy Bastard Guide to Mandarin: An Abridged Corpus of Axioms, Vocabulary and Purported Meanings by Christian Adams
- 101 Learn and Read Chinese Flash Cards by Ben Shaffer
First of all, forget the irony of the Lazy Bastard curriculum. Clearly, James McGlasson (#4) is familiar with the concept, and perhaps Nathan Cain (#7) truly has a sense of humor. I don’t know that it’s worth $2.99 to find out. However, their books are clearly meant to be instructional whereas the LBGTM is not; what’s truly remarkable about its lofty chart position is two-fold. The eBook is available for purchase and download from Amazon with a Kindle device; there have been no reports of issues on that front. However, if you do a lot of online shopping from your personal computer (i.e. desktop PC or laptop), the book is readily available as long as you’re not using one of the following browsers: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox—meaning 90% of all internet users will be able to find the book, but when they try to buy it, they’re informed that the book is “Not Currently Available.” Now, if you’re using Apple Safari, there’s no problem. This tech issue is on Amazon’s end and hopefully, fingers crossed, will be resolved in the near future.
The second remarkable thing about LBGTM’s chart success says more about the market for Chinese instructional materials. When a book that basically says, “Don’t bother” is the ninth best-selling book in the Kindle Store, either nobody is interested in learning Chinese, or at the very least, fewer people are interested in reading about it. And that in and of itself is what makes the Lazy Bastard Guide something worth waiting for, or perhaps, taking a few extra mouse clicks to find.
Black Sunshine Media 