Customer Reviews

Integrated Chinese: Level 1, Part 2 Audio CDs

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(2)
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The audio quality is poor, some annoying background noise. Not sure why but it's clearly worse once I ripped them (digital and converting to 160kbps MP3s in iTunes). Now it's still clearly noticeable when playing from the CDs (using the computer).

It's not only the audio quality that's poor, it's also clearly a low budget for the prodcution using only one female and one male voice even though the dialogues often have two female or male actors. A couple chinese teacher could probably spend a day or two producing the entire series using just two microphones and computer with CD burner. Amazing that this is supposed to be the most widely used text book in US.

IMHO...The dialogues are re-produced verbatim, they allow you to read the dialogues as you listen, immensely helpful in learning to read Chinese script.
There are lots of books out there with no sound files available or where the sound files don't match the text.
These are quite good in that respect.
The other criticisms may be accurate but the book is greatly enhanced by this cd.
this is a good investment for a beginning student, without it I would have been lost in the class I took.

As the other reviewer noted, this is a poor quality production, particularly in light of how many institutions make use of these materials.

Here are a list of my criticisms:
1) There are only two speakers throughout the series, thus students only get exposed to two voices. Additionally, those two voices play the parts of numerous different characters, sometimes doing double duty in one dialogue. Sometimes using a male voice for a female character.
2) The speed of the speakers is unnaturally slow. There is an attempt made to provide three speeds for the dialogues, but it seems as if those three speeds were achieved by simply slowing down or speeding up the original recording. The speakers also take unnaturally long pauses between phrases (though not long enough for listen and repeat type practice). The overall intonation of sentences doesn't sound very natural either.
3) There are only recordings of the dialogues and a list of vocabulary for each lesson. In the readings of the dialogues, there are no pauses that would allow students time to repeat after a sentence. There are no sentence build-up drills that break down long phrases or target difficult spots. To be useful as more than listening practice the student will have to rely on the pause button.
4) It is too expensive.
I sympathize with the producers in so much as it is pain-staking and often dull work to make good recordings for use in language study, but considering how many of these must be sold and how important the influence of these recordings is on those hoping to be future Mandarin speakers, such obstacles ought to have been overcome.