Customer Reviews

Easy Chinese: Basic Text and Workbook - Mandarin, Level 1 (Books & CD-ROM)

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

 

 

I've been meaning to learn this language for some time now, and finally got around to it by buying a few books about it, here on Amazon. Most books will kick right into the subject going to advanced almost immediately, which makes the learning process very difficult indeed.
This book, Easy Chinese Mandarin, however should definately be on your wish list if you intend to learn this language. I give it a good five stars, simply because it shows the characters in the written language, the pronounciation of the character, and all of its different meanings that go from the most easy of all the characters and then gradually onwards to the more advanced parts in a nice slow and gradual way so that you pace yourself nicely.

The CD-ROM that comes with the book is also an excellent idea. Reading the chinese is one thing, but with all the different phonetics that come with a word are another, and you dont learn this by simply reading off of a book. You actually learn the sounds of the words, you learn how to pronounce it correctly!

I suggest that if you are looking into learning Chinese Mandarin, that you make a start by getting yourself this great book. Enjoy!

This is a very difficult review. In the first instance I have to agree with the other reviewer that this is appalling software, totally exhausting a CPU (which, for the non-techs, is absolutely unnecessary). This is especially important because the software is essential to the course, not just an optional extra, and if you use a laptop your fan will be going flat out throughout your lesson which is quite distracting. The interface is also totally modal, like something you would see in the 80s. This gives a very disjointed and inflexible experience.

On the other hand, I really think the course itself is so well designed that it might just succeed in teaching Mandarin to a Westerner, even one with no inherent language ability. It introduces elements in a very deliberate and intelligent way, has most of the content that I had hoped for, and exceeded my expectations.

5 stars for the course design. 0 stars for the accompanying software.

First this review is from a beginners point of view, and after looking to buy a chinese "course" among several titles I decided for this book and I do not regret the decision. Now to the review: This book is decent but the software that accompanies it makes it good, do not be discouraged that it is not "excellent", you DO can learn chinese with this book. Firts lets talk about the negative aspects of this book and its CDROM. It focuses on writing and reading and not so much in speaking or hearing. For instance, on the book you barely get any mention of the famous 4 tones of chinese, but in the CDROM you can hear every character of the book and also see a simple diagram of how is the tone pronnounced (like going from a high to low tone ); sadly the pronounciation is not as clear a one would wish and you spend about 3 seconds whenever you want to hear again the last character. This book is not like the one you would find in a formal chinese class, it has no pictures with dialogs and to be honest it is a bit abstract, if you are a good self student then this book is really helpful in learning.
On the good side this book has traditional and simplified forms, the CD shows you how to write the characters and also a has a nice explanation of how many of the characters came to be that REALLY helps to remember them. Also the exercises section of the book is thorough (only with the written chars.) and you know the best way to learn is to practice; I was forgetting, the selection of the characters to learn is very good, you learn popupar characters that let you start recognizing them wherever you read real soon!. My recommendation is to buy two books, not just one, no matter how good people say they are you are better with two sources of information. This book is strong in reading and writing and getting the "idea" of the characters so you should get another that is strong in developing your hearing and speaking abilities.

In my opinion this audiobook deserves 10 stars. If you are really interested in learning to write and read mandarin buy this tutorial in the first place .
Dr Chang has developed an amazing and effective way to make it easier to write the chinese characters. An added bonus is that the software also teaches you how to pronounce the words and best of all, the words are built into sentences with a preliminary introduction of grammar.
In few words: you can learn the basics of mandarin by your own and paying just what a teacher charges you for an hour.
Let me recommend also the other book published by Dr Chang: "Knocking at the Gate of Life". It is an encyclopedia of the chinese healing exercises and in it you will find all kind of exercises with significant therapeutic value.

I purchased this for my 8-year old son because we couldn't accommodate his request to attend Chinese classes in around his school/sports/piano schedules. He "loves it" and I'm relieved that he can progress at his own pace, as he has time, without me hovering. . . with two even littler ones, I can't always afford to do that!

Besides the benefit of enabling his self-study (cd is easily navigatable by a child and the pinyin intuitive) this system works for us because I want my son to learn both the traditional and simplified characters. However, I must admit that I have always planned to supplement his learning myself, especially in the area of pronounciation. (I both speak Mandarin Chinese with my family and studied it (Yale method) and Cantonese in college).

Looks like the price has gone up from the $26+ I spent, but it definitely fit the bill for our family.

First off I want to state that this is not a complete review, because I have yet to read and impliment the learning techniques provided in the book. I am writing this review, because I believe that I have discovered a workaround that will allow people to use the, very badly written, program on their pc's and laptops.

Microsoft provides a free program called Virtual PC 2007, [...]. Virtual PC, allows you to install an operating system (OS) within the Virtual PC program, and once the OS is installed you can then install any program you want into it, just as you would on a physical pc. Virtual PC allows you to control how much memory the Virtual PC will use. Without going into the technical details, I installed Easy Chinese into Windows XP running on Virtual PC and it works pretty good. Too improve performance I copied the files from the CD to the harddrive (virtual). Now I still get the memory errors that everyone talked about, but I can use the program without concerns of it eating up the memory or processor resource of my laptop. It takes a little time to get Virtual PC up and running, but once its setup you are going to use it for other programs that will not run on your pc or laptop because you upgraded to Vista or Windows XP. Virtual PC will even run DOS, Windows 95 and Windows 2000 OS's.

While I'm pleased with the methodology, the quality of the book and the exercises, I'm disappointed with the CDROM Tutor application. The user interface design is very poor and unintuitive. Certain sound files are corrupted since clicking them results in an error message ("computer memory is full"). As a result, pronounciation is unavailable for those characters. At the lowest level, the application must also be poorly coded since it constantly consumes 98% CPU power on a powerful PC. In this day and age, the application ought to be browser-based. I recommend that the author overhaul the application and port it to a new technology.

I read the descriptions of the book and CD and found them quite intriguing. However, with the comments by some of the Amazon reviewers, I was a bit skeptical about making the purchase. I am so GLAD that I did.

Without going into too much details that one could get from the descriptions of this book and CD set from Amazon,the following is what I liked about them.

Book:

Pro:
1. Chinese characters in font sizes that one could make out the details and be able to copy/write them as needed for practice.
2. The book includes both the Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters.

Con:
1. Didn't have a pronunciation key.

CD-Rom:
Because one reviewer had problems loading the CD in a couple of operating systems that I was a bit concern that it would not work on my computer. So, I tested the CD in Window's XP, Window's Vista, and Window's 7...they all WORK. Please make sure to follow the instructions and open the "chn.exe".

Pro:
1. Interactive program.

Con:
1. A bit slow but it was coded/copyrighted in 2003

The book and CD (are well suited for novices like myself) could be used independently, but DON'T!!! Use them together...the WHOLE is far greater than the sum of its parts, IMHO. For me, this was/is an excellent purchase.

The products description states "System Requirements: Windows 95 or higher". Unfortunately, the included CD-ROM does not work with Windows 7. I tried it on 2 different computers.