Customer Reviews

Instant Immersion Mandarin Chinese Deluxe [Old Version]

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This program doesn't seem to be good for absolute beginners, but it's good for expanding your vocabulary. It took me a while working with other programs for learning Chinese before I was ready to make good use of this one. Dictionary part of it is awesome because you can see how the words are written in Chinese characters as well as in pinyin. It has lots of fun games to test your comprehension and a lot of the material is focused on testing your knowledge of Chinese characters.

The program does teach some dialogues as well as grammar and it is helpful for making sure you're pronouncing the words correctly, but for me the greatest benefit of this program lies in helping one to learn lots of words and characters. You get to learn about 3000 words and 800 characters and the best part about all of these words is that you get to hear them and you get to play with characters through lots of fun games. It really does help to retain the information.

There are 5 CD ROMs and 3 audio CDs in this package.

The 3 audio CDs have some useful pronunciation tips and some everyday phrases.

One CD ROM is called 'Blackbelt Chinese'. It is nothing more than a vocabulary memorizer. There are about 100 (estimating) vocabulary lessons of 8 words each, and it uses a Mah-Jong game to test you after you learn the words. In the game, you match the Chinese character with a picture that represents a word in English. Some of these are a stretch, like the picture for 'absent'; others are hard to distinguish, like 'high-school' and 'middle-school'. When you match the word, it says the Chinese word out loud (except for the last one). It's a fun tool, though, and good for memorizing. It also uses the traditional characters, rather than the modern simplified ones. Traditionals are used in Taiwan, simplified in mainland China.

The other 4 CD ROMs are basic phrasebook lessons. I couldn't figure out how to use them, and there was no instructions, and the 'help' function was not very helpful. I decided to learn some Chinese vocabulary and grammar elsewhere, and to come back to these lessons to see if there is anything useful in them. The confusing thing about them was that there is a great variety of things to click on, and each one seems to expect that you already know some Chinese.

I would emphatically recommend against buying this product. It is not systematic at all and most of it is nearly useless unless you purchase other materials. Also, the material it covers is very limited; you would be better off buying a simple phrasebook.