Customer Reviews

Earworms Chinese: 200+ Essential Words and Phrases Anchored into Your Long Term Memory With Great Music (Earworms: Musical Brain Trainer) (English and Chinese Edition)

5 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I lived in China for a year, and so used this product to help me learn Chinese. I found a lot of other methods online too dry, and boring for me, but Earworms worked well. I agree not including the pinyin was a mistake, but I was still pleased that I could easily recall Chinese words very quickly and easily. I think the pronunciation they teach is fine, everyone understood me when I used a new word I had learnt from it. I would recommend it to others, mainly as a first step into the language, to brush up on key language, or if you have a short attention span.

5/5

Like other Berlitz Chinese phrasebooks, this one makes the serious mistake of using its own phonetic system for pronouncing Chinese (ie, putonghua) words, instead of the one used in China, namely pinyin.

First, although pinyin is not easy for foreigners to learn, if you're going to China and making the effort to speak a bit of Chinese, then you might as well learn pinyin. Place names, for example, are usually written in pinyin, and so if you can pronounce things correctly using pinyin, then you will be better able to tell a taxi driver where you want to go.

Second, although pinyin has its problems, so does the phonetic system used in this book. A good phonetics system for English-speakers would be one where you could read the word as it would be said in English, and it comes out sounding correct in Chinese. I know how to correctly say many of the Chinese (putonghua) words in this book. I skimmed a few pages of this book, and using the English-pronunciation method, for me the words do not come out sounding like the correct word in Chinese. The book does include pinyin alongside its own system, but I think that will teach you the incorrect pronunciation of pinyin.

Therefore, using this book you will trade a flawed but useful phonetics system (pinyin) for another flawed but useless phonetics system.

Otherwise, the teaching/learning method of this series of foreign-language phrasebooks looks good, and the selected phrases are useful. But those advantages are far outweighed by the disadvantages of the serious risk of learning bad pronunciation, and not learning (correct) pinyin pronunciation.

Thumbs down, way down, on this book. Instead, look for a phrasebook that uses pinyin, for example the one from Collins.