The Teach Yourself series

What is /lang/'s opinion of the Teach Yourself Languages series?

I bought their Latin book, and was blown away by how awesome it was. I was told Wheelock's is the best for learning Latin, but I think many of them haven't heard of it. It is so clear in it's explanations, it's a shame it's a dead language.

I bought their Mandarin Chinese book, but I wasn't quite as pleased with it. When I got the Latin book, I looked through it and I knew what was to be learned and what my labors would manifest into to.

For the Mandarin Chinese book, it's struck me more as a traveler's book. Not really for learning the language. I understand you must know the basics of a language, but I've seen much of this in traveler's companion series in book stores.

Has anyone else here in a Teach Yourself language book and like to share their opinions of it?

I have the Teach Yourself Hungarian book and it's quite good (though I'm only ₂/³ of the way through so far).

Although it starts off with things that will be useful for a traveller, it progresses to things which are more useful in general and covers a decent amount of grammar. It seems a good starting point for learning more of the language, which I think I will definitely need to do.

>>2

Ahh, thanks for the input there. The Chinese one wasn't as bad I thought it was, it uses a series of conversations as starting points for explaining Chinese grammar and sentence creation. It ditches it once it goes in depth explaining the character system.

the gaelic one worked well for me (everybody else i know hates it though) but the spanish one didn't help at all.