Customer Reviews

Chinese (Mandarin), Conversational: Learn to Speak and Understand Mandarin Chinese with Pimsleur Language Programs (Pimsleur Instant Conversation)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Obviously the course you chose should depend on what you want as well as how you learn. This Pimsleur course offers conversational Mandarin, not reading or writing. In fact that is what I want right now. It proceeds almost entirely by immersion with very little discussion of grammar or pronunciation. That is not perfect for me, though it might be for you. I will come back to it. This Pimsleur course is entirely audio and so is very well suited to learning as you drive or walk or whatever.

This is very convenient but there is another reason for it: Pimsleur has theory that if you look at written Mandarin (or any language) too early then you will have trouble acquiring a native accent, because you will pronounce the written Mandarin with an American accent (supposing you are American...). This may be exactly right, if Mandarin is only your second language. If you have already learned several languages with reasonably correct accents then maybe you will have less tendency to make that mistake.

The problem with immersion-only Mandarin for me is that this is an intimidating language for Americans. The musical tone of each vowel changes the meaning of a word and the tones are hard for me to learn.

So I am going to cheat on Pimsleur by also using Chinesepod downloads (mp3) and their written supplements. Sometimes I really can't be sure if a syllable on the Pimsleur CD begins with b or d. I can't always tell if a tone is rising or falling (although the narrator often steps in to help with that). So I will look it up. If Mandarin is your first foreign language maybe you should start with straight Pimsleur for just the reasons they give. Mandarin, even more than most European languages, is useless if you do not have a good accent.

The other course I tried was Living Language Ultimate Mandarin. That course is not only conversation. It comes with a very nice textbook. And it requires that you spend considerable time working with the book in front of you, and so not driving or otherwise "on the go." They said their course was the equivalent of 2 years of college courses and that may be true. It aims at all around mastery of spoken and written Mandarin including the simplified character writing used on the Mainland and exposure to the traditional characters used on Taiwan and in Hong Kong. I do not expect to ever reach that level, and anyway I would probably start with Pimsleur and Chinesepod.

Pimsleur courses are reliably very good.

Pimsleur is good for getting your feet wet but it's also lacking in that it only teaches you a few conversation topics. It stresses pronounciation of words and making your tones match the speakers on the disc, but tells you nothing about the four tones of Chinese (found that out the hard way). It also does not go much into sentence construction, only forming a pre-meditated sentence.
I give it 4 stars because as a beginner with no prior experience in Mandarin, it let me get a grasp of what I would be studying in more in-depth lessons. So if you know absolutely --nothing-- about Mandarin then I recommend Pimsleur.
P.S. Don't get the four disc version. The eight disc-er has the first four and nothing's different.

The problem with the Pimsleur approach is that they teach far too little vocabulary. You go on and on learning just a few words, and worse. You have to tolerate the 'gradual intervail recall system' which means you have to listen to entire half hour to follow their rigid program and if you don't, your memory technique is wasted.
This means that if you have, say, ten minutes in which to commute to work, you will listen to the same ten minutes teaching the same ten words over and over.
Your other alternative is to keep your finger glued to the fast forward button. There are no
'multiple track' opitons.
I greatly prefer the Behind the Wheel Chinese/Mandarin course.
The amount of vocabulary taught here far exceeds that of Pimsleur. Furthermore,
each CD has a sentence building section (8 CDs in all) that teach you basic sentence formation to accompany the vocabulary. There are two native Mandarin speakers on the CDs.
Even better, Behind the Wheel Chinese has multiple tracks which makes sailing through a review a piece of cake.
I gave Pimsleur four stars just because I'm sure it could work for some people.
I have tried other Pimsleur and Behind the Wheel courses and I always reach the same conclusion.
No contest in any language.
Behind the Wheel Chinese is way ahead in all categories.

I really think this is a good method of learning, particularly Chinese. The people I know who speak English as a second language best are people who learned it by watching TV, not by studying. This second group of people often has the worst accents. Since the hardest part of Mandarin is the pronunciation, I figured the best approach would be to go alphabet-free for the first few years of my study. These CDs just allow you to listen and try to imitate, which I think is the best way.

Now the bad thing is that you really will not learn very much. You're not even going to learn the basics with these 7 CDs. What you will learn is several phrases (and most of the individual words in those phrases), but I've listened to these CD's over and over for the past year (to practice the pronunciation multiple times) and what I've learned from these CDs in the past year I feel I could have learned in about an hour or two in any European language (for which the pronunciation is a lot easier).

Also, the add above says this is the "first half" of the comphrehensive set. That's true only if you consider the comhrehensive set to consist in the first set (I out of III). It is indeed the first half of the first set of the comphrehensive set.

I would recommend these CDs to anyone just starting out. I didn't expect to learn a ton of Chinese, just to practice pronunciation, but even I was surprised at how little Chinese I ended up learning by the end. There are so many pauses and repeats in the CDs that I think they could easily have taught twice the material in the CDs provided. It might sound like a lot of pauses and repetition would be good, but I can just repeat the cd myself (and I did). I'd rather they put more material on the CD so I could learn more once I finished learning a CD.

I love Pimsleur's method, but NOT FOR STARTING Mandarin. Needs more explanation, not "listen and repeat".

For an English speaker, Mandarin requires more up-front explanation of how the pitched syllables work.

I've used Pimsleur's audio CDs for learning basic Japanese and Spanish and *LOVED* it.

But when I bought Pimsleur's Mandarin, I was stumped. I couldn't even imitate the very first sentence, no matter how many times I went back and tried again. My mouth just didn't know how to make that sound. And there was no explanation, just "listen and repeat".

After an hour of trying one sentence of this Pimsleur Mandarin, I had to give up. Knowing there must be a better way, I was about to take private lessons.

Instead, the brand new "Michel Thomas Method" to Mandarin has just been released by Dr. Harold Goodman and it made all the difference in the world. A completely different approach that I feel needs to come FIRST, BEFORE you get into the Pimsleur method.

In the Michel Thomas method, someone really takes the time to explain the sounds and grammar. No memorization, just explanation then experience. It gets you really understanding the basic building blocks of Mandarin first, so that when you're done with its 10-hour audio CD program, THEN you can come back here to Pimsleur's Mandarin and it'll all make sense.

This is the best audio language program I have used for a very challenging language. Unlike other audio programs that cram in much vocabulary and too little response time, Pimsleur Mandarin limits the vocabulary but teaches the beginner how to organize sentences. They do this through repetition and substitution. It was so subtle that I didn't realize how much grammar I learned. Used in combination with a book that provides Pinyin spelling and tones, it is even more useful for continuing at the intermediate levels. My only complaint is with how Simon and Shuster markets the set. I thought this was the complete Mandarin I course. It is only the first 16 lessons. To complete Mandarin I, you will need to purchase another set with 14 more lessons. The price is $175 or more depending on coupons and discounts. The problem is, this set includes the first 16 lessons that you already own and you have already mastered. This makes it redundant and expensive. I completed Mandarin I by finding a complete set on cassette(not CD as I preferred) at the library. Now, I just bought Pimsleur Mandarin II in CD and hope it is complete. None of this should detract from the fact that the curriculum is highly effective.

This is a fantastic resource for beginners. I purchased it two weeks prior to a symposium on the future of China-US relations that my department at Cornell was hosting. I felt that it was imperative to have some Madarin before our Chinese delegates arrived from Beida. When the delegates arrived, not only could I understand much of the basic conversation, but they (and my supervisors) were pleasantly surprised at how perfect my Manadrin was! This is not an in depth cousre, but a jumping off point to subsequent learning. I found it very helpful that suggestions and explanations of the language and culture were offered along the way. A great resource.

I am fairly good at languages and find myself a bit surprised at all the glowing reviews for this product. At a dense half an hour each, the lessons were just not concise enough for me to remain focused on the material. Explanation is kept to such a minimum that the student is required to deduce sentence structure (for instance, we are told that the syllable "ma" is used to make a phrase negative, but we are not instructed as to where to place it in a sentence -- after the verb? the noun? at the end of the sentence?) Also, the instruction stresses the importance of matching one's pronunciation to that of the native speakers, yet the two speakers, one male and one female, pronounce phrases distinctly differently. In addition, the male speaker, who predominates, pronounces the same phrases differently several times in different sections of the lesson. (And both speakers speak WAY too fast.) The phrases themselves are not particularly useful (I have spent a week so far trying to learn how to say "I speak a little Chinese" which, in fact, I obviously don't.) The most interesting thing is, the lessons manage to be too long and too fast at the same time. Memorization is difficult without written materials or writing things down to reinforce them. Personally, I would prefer a package with more concise, memorable lessons, more useful phrases and more consistency in pronunciation.

I did a lot of research on the Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone products prior to making this purchase. The Pimsleur program is a very good value, and it is just what I was looking for. It's perfect to take with on a long trip as most of the half hour lessons will require you to go through more than once. I wish there was at least some printed material with it, but I am learning without it. In buying the first 16 lessons in Conversational Mandarin Chinese, Simon and Schuster offers a credit on the next package that has 32 lessons (the first 16 plus 16 more).

This is exactly the product I was looking for.

I have finished Pimsleur Mandarin I-III and did all the lessons at least 3 times.

The Pimsleur series in general, always encourages a sense of enthusiasm mainly for the deceptive (perhaps too strong a word) marketing and partly for the somewhat raving reviews!

To put my review in context I am a native English speaker with much more natural ability in physical sciences rather than languages I have always been very mediocre in languages and never had any interest whatsoever in learning a foreign language. It more was just a passing interest that first introduced me to Mandarin Chinese. With a curiosity of the impenetrable nature of the language so distant from English grasped my interest but I really just started at a whim. Very Surprisingly continued with it off and on to the end of the 3rd Series.

Pimsleur focuses on the 30 minute a day lessons, Seems easy right? Hence the full course should take 90 days before you have attained a advanced beginner stage. Therein lies the problem. If one realistically expects to get a good grasp of a language with just 30 mins a day, then one is very much mistaken! In my view it takes a lot, lot, longer that this, at least 3 times as long.

Some reviewers are obviously a lot better than I at picking up a language and have noted the slow progress. For me progress was a little too fast and I need to constantly repeat the lesson or going over old lessons, especially as you advance on throughout the units.

I think a lot of points have been made already about the Pimsleur Mandarin Series however I will add some for clarity

Pimsleur Context
No question about it Pimsleur should not be your only source. You should at least have a pocket dictionary (The Collins pocket dictionary is good), a grammar book (Basic Chinese Grammar by Yip Po-Ching, et al), and by series II, a good set of websites. There are loads of excellent free ones that list and detail issues such as measure words, proper discussion of tenses. Even towards the end I hadn't really grasped the proper use of the `le' and `de' particle.

Pros
Its maintains interest!
This should not be underestimated! Learning Chinese is difficult but ultimately rewarding. **If you are doing it for personal reward like me, this one key point outweighs all the cons below and justifies the course in the first place** I work long hours and the last thing I want to do is read a traditional text book in Mandarin every evening. I never took to solely slogging my way through a tedious grammar book or constant repetition of words via a flash cards. Pimsleur takes you from the first few basic words to complete (albeit short) sentences by day one. Pimsleur does an excellent job of bite size learning which maintains the enthusiasm!

Great stepping stone
Naively I thought the 3 series would put me at an intermediate stage. You can have a basic elementary conversation with a native speaker who speaks slowly but as soon as the conversation takes off, or they alter the sentence, drop in unknown words, you are lost! This can be very disheartening as unfortunately (or more realistically), most people don't speak with the great clarity as the speaker on the audio files. This is not all bad, you are left with a strong sense of feeling that you can progress at a similar pace should you choose to continue on your own studies or via some other taught course. I read somewhere that 90% of spoken Chinese is covered by 1000 most frequently used characters (note characters not words!). Not sure how accurate my facts are!

Cons
Lack of script.
This is a major drawback in my view. This is the main reason I retract a point from the rating.
The tones and characters can be very subtle. Although the tones should very different at the start as the lessons progress, you forget what exactly the tone the speaker is actually using, so you end up convincing yourself that you have been saying the correct tone all along. Furthermore, `Tone Shandi' is not mentioned at all, For example: in lesson one, you are told that hello = ni3 hao3, i.e. 2, 3rd tone characters, however, when 2, 3rd tone characters appear in a row like this, native speakers pronounce the first one with a 2nd tone, i.e. ni2 hao3.
I am baffled as to why Pimsleur refuse to give transcripts, it can only aid the course. No-one is going to get the script and not use the course! Although you can get attain a transcript fairly easily on the web if one is inclined to do so, you can, with the aid of a dictionary and a few good websites, write you own script and Dictionary. This is tedious but invariably time well spent. I wrote out most of the lessons in Pimsleur with its corresponding pinyin, (with the aid of my Chinese flat mate!) and it was a huge help! Writing out all the words in pinyin will really hammer the tones and pronunciation in. Some tones are very subtle and are a key part of a taught course, where by you are trying to distinguished, for example, between `si' and `ci'. Pimsleur makes little attempt at highlighting the differences

Continuity
Although for the most part, the lessons build from one another, there is a fair portion of words that are never repeated. Contrary to what they recommend I found great benefit from repeating old lessons. Some words in Series one are not repeated after that. Its not a major drawback as they can't very well keep repeating every word regularly but definitely once you finish them all, meander about through lessons.

Price
Its expensive but it's a great start to the language, much better than Rosetta stone which is all bells and whistles. You will get a lot more that the 90 days @ 30mins a day out of it.

Lack of grammar
As the lessons continue, you need to supplement the course with a decent grammar book. The `le' particle is actually explained properly, (albeit briefly) in one of the accompanying audio notes but nevertheless the use of measure words, particles and time construct, is only loosely discussed. Furthermore a good grammar book will rectify that and be very encouraging to read /dip into. Basic Chinese Grammar, by Yip Po-Ching, et al is an excellent accompaniment. When you read it, you do a lot of "Oh really!", "yes I see!!!", "that makes sense!" etc

Vocabulary
For me this is a minor point, Pimsleur covers about 450 (I have the full list) It's shorter than Rosetta Stone and other competing packs but it is minor, Some other reviews mentioned that you only learn 3 colours, red, green and white. It's a very simple task to take out a pocket dictionary and learn the rest should you wish! Its not important at all. They are used in the same context. I think it is much better to know 400 words well rather than 1000 pronounced incorrectly and used in the wrong context. The Tuttle flash cards are great compliment. You can't compare 2 programs on a cost per word basis,

As for choice of vocabulary, I would have liked to see a different choice of words. You learn about 15 place names in China, 3 in the USA and that's it. A few country names or continent names would be nice. Also there is a lot of talk about tennis and bowling in Series 2 but no mention of Mahjong or ping pong. The only food/beverage they mention is water, beer, tea, wine, coffee and mung bean cake! I am told by native Chinese that it's a odd one to learn! I would have thought that in 90 lessons you could put in a handful of scenarios that ask the waiter for Chicken, beef, fish noodles etc! Its invaluable in China, how to order in a restaurant. There are several websites that summaries frequency of characters in the Chinese language. That is they list every word and character in order of common usage based of statistical studies. Pimsleur can mention character 2000 and miss out the 30th most common character. i.e. you are taught "microphone" but not "fish" Minor points again but shows that the series could be optimised a little better.

My guide to Course
Make your own notes!
I, like other reviews was initially disappointed by the lack of a script. I, 100% recommend making your own notes, Writing the pinyin really does beat home the pronunciation and tones. Also, some great snippets are noted through the lessons but unless you write them down you are left searching through previous units for something that you knew was important but just can't find it. It takes a while for the brain to grasp that there are a huge amount of characters that sound the same and have different meanings (even those with same tones). Your brain naturally starts doing a one-to-one association with mandarin-English link. Hence writing all words out in a table in MS word and sorting alphabetically by pinyin (i.e. mini dictionary) is very interesting to see, you have a lot of `z' and `x' words. You do about 450 words over 90 lessons so about 5 per lesson on average. Its pretty easy to write word in English and corresponding pinyin & characters in MS excel or MS word, Will make a massive difference

Repetition, repetition, repetition!

Other material
I have Tuttle flash cards but to be honest I rarely use them. There are a lot of websites

Avoid False marketing
I see a lot of adverts for "learn 80 characters a day guaranteed" or "become fluent by tea time" by Dr Wang `"4 PhD's" Cheung, ... blah blah. Its not going to happen!

User Reviews
Everybody has they own style of learning, one method doesn't necessarily preclude another.
Read completed reviews on Amazon. There are a lot of reviews where people have be enthuastic about the material and reviewed it after 10 minutes (I am guilty of that to!)

Don't just do it once
Its not like school where you try pass an exam and forget it. If you really want to learn, repeat lessons and when you finished start bouncing around through the course. I listen to it on my IPOD and when I was finished all 3 series I went back over it doing first 10 mins of Unit I, lesson 5, Unit II lesson 5, Unit III lesson 5 etc. Remember speaking a language is not sequential, topics can occurs at any stage

Supplement the course
There is a huge amount of websites around, loads of decent free material. I can't put links in this review but search for "pinyin table", "mandarin" etc A grammar book to dip in and out of by Series 2 is essential in my view.

Update
I recently registered on a mandarin language course and also got a copy of the Rosetta stone CD series.

Pimsleur V Rosetta Stone
There is a review on Amazon by Timothy bender I think on the Rosetta stone series. It's a spot on review in my opinion. Rosetta stone is all bells and whistle and more like a entertaining bit of software rather than a serious means of learning a language. The subtleties in pronouncing the initials and finals in pinyin are completely missed by the voice detection system. You can say a word with word sound and wrong tone and Rosetta stones says you got it perfectly even on the most sensitive detection level. RS teaches characters so that's a positive. Personally I think the `immersion' system or whatever they call is a gimmick in my view. A native English speaker has been engrained with speaking the language, it cant be undone.
Pimsleur beats it hands down (for oral of course, no characters)

Pimsleur V Taught course
I recently started a taught Mandarin course at well known language school. There are pros and cons. Cost is an obvious one. Pimsleur starts to look fairly priced compared with a taught course. Taught courses have the benefit of interaction, being able to ask questions, discussion points about mandarin phrases etc
Disadvantages are, don't cover as much material on a cost basis, grammar covered more, may not meet schedule.
Naturally, it completely depends on ones circumstance, and the nature of the taught course. A lot of taught courses here in the UK are simply taught by native speakers and actually they don't make the best teachers (i.e. could you teach English successfully?)