Customer Reviews

Instant Immersion Chinese Deluxe v3.0

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

 

 

I have a Windows Vista laptop with a built in microphone and both the software and the DVD ran without any problem. The voice recognition is great and will have you pronouncing the Mandarin tones correctly in no time. The lessons are good but too short. The only drawback to the software is that there isn't a clear place to start. You have to browse through the icons and figure it out for yourself. The audio instruction is well thought out and you will learn new words and phrases quickly. I would recommend this to Mandarin Language beginners. If you already know Mandarin tones and a modicum of words then this is not for you.

Are you kidding me?!? What is this? Let's see, where do I start? First of all, these aren't lessons that hold your hand. They are a collection of exercises. If you are expecting to learn anything from this product, you will be sorely disappointed. It's a schitzophrenic collection of crap with absolutely no organization or clear direction.

Admittedely if you already know Mandarin, the voice recognition may be helpful, but that's about it. After wasting an hour of my time discovering that I won't learn anything from this product, I was so desperate to get my moneys worth that I went to the glossary to learn common words. The glossary contains a tabstrip, containing each letter of the alphabet (A | B | C | ...). I went to click on "B" hoping to find "Boy", and was sorely upset when the "B" tab contained the chinese words categorized alphabetically, not the english word. Yeah, that does me alot of good.

It is absolutely astonishing to me that this company put out a product like this. Unreal. I spent a few minutes reading others comments on this product as well as other products that this company creates. If you read anything positive, I guarantee the person posting works for the company.

Do yourself a favor and save yourself from frustration, time, and money. I have found better learning resources on the internet for free. Thank goodness I purchased this from a used bookstore. Imagine how upset I would have been had I paid full price for it! :)

I was so hopeful for the set - however I had issues almost from the get go. My primary PC is vista and one of the PC dvds simply did not work. Not only that, but there is no feedback to know if its the dvd, the program, or if the application is just slow.

For example, you can click on a lesson and then you might see a dialog box saying something like loading and then ... nothing. 20 minutes of nothing.

What is good is the vice recognition. They did an excellent job here of helping you match the tones to the words. And by giving several levels of matching, they allow beginners to progress without getting overwhelmed by always getting it wrong so to speak.

The additional, not application DVDs (for the car, or where ever) are a nice touch but I've frankly never found that type of learning helpful.

If they could fix the application issues, I think this could be a decent intro to Mandarin. Without the fixes, this is a product I simply cannot recommend

I wish I could give this product a good review, but it would have to run on my computer in order for me to do that. If you have Vista beware. The customer service folks tried to help, but they finally gave up. I asked a few questions that would allow me to do it manually, but they ignored those and pointed me in totally worthless directions.

They finally offered me a refund, but I haven't taken them up on it yet. I was able to run on my office PC running XP. I copied the disk to a thumb drive and then burned a DVD on my own computer. That ran, but did not install correctly, and I don't think their customer service people are that technically savvy to be able to help.

In the the areas that I could get to run, I noticed the people speaking were using Taiwanese versions of Mandarin, not Beijing as I was expeting.