Learn Chinese Now! 9 (PC/Mac)

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
Learn Chinese Now! 9.0 comes with two CDs, one of which has various key sections--useful "survival phrases", fun activities, conversations and practising speech against the voice of a native speaker. The other CD has a thorough grammar tutorial. This combination is certainly a valuable one for people who are serious about learning a language, and the product is clear and easy to use: in role-plays, phrases are highlighted in a box and their English translations placed underneath, while the voice recognition software allows you to measure your own voice against that of a native speaker and the games hone the things that have been learned. Sections are tailored to various activities, such as getting around, going out and business situations, while at any point you can call up a grammar tutorial that will explain a topic in more detail.

The section on survival phrases will be of much use to those who have already reached a basic level. There are several practice dialogues based on common situations--in the hotel, the bar, the airport, etc.--with some examples that demonstrate a wicked sense of humour. Although some of the advice borders on the infantile ("When you decide to travel outside the USA, you will probably need a passport"), much of it is useful and rounds out a well-composed package for someone starting out on the road to using the language overseas. --Toby Green

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2005-03-03 rating:
Chinese Now
Ok so this CD has some neat features, but as far as teaching someone chinese goes it's a faliure. Mandarin isn't built around singular word meanings, like western languages, it's built around phrases. This product shows a fundamental lack of understanding in the language it attempts to teach, by being too idiomatic. It doesn't explain anything, so a user of this product isn't going to really understand how mandarin works which is the first stage towards actually speaking it. It has a crass monkey-see monkey-do approach which may be ok for someone visting china who wants to know a few phrases, but this is no good for a serious learner of the language. It also has many tone errors on words, and many of the phrases are outdated. The one thing you can learn well from it is pronounciation, but there's no reason why this shouldn't be accompanied by a teaching structure and content that actually works.


review by: Marios date: 2003-11-26 rating:
DIFFUCULT TO SAY WHICH IS MORE COMPLICATED
Its bad enough deciding to learn Chinese. On top of the language difficulties, having to find your way around this software does not help. The whole programme appears to be without structure and I am not exaggerating when I say that I couldn't figure out where to begin, even after a few honest attempts. There must be an easier way to learn!!

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