Customer Reviews

Journeys to the East: The River Dragon King

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We now have one of each of the more popular Chinese language DVD programs on Amazon (Little Pim, Mei Mei, Follow Jade, Kai-Lan) including this title. What makes it outstanding is that individual words/objects introduced at the start of the story are integrated into full sentences by the end of the story. There are multiple ways to practice the new words which make it fun and memorable. The Play & Learn with Mei Mei #1 also introduced sentences but was inconsistent about explaining all the additional words. The (English/Chinese) subtitling in JTTE are very handy, are accurate, and consistent.

For future DVDs in the series, I'd ask that they modify or exclude song sequences like the one that the River Dragon God sings. It's just awful to hear IMHO. <grin> There is also at least one very notable difference in pronunciation ("er") between this program and all the others I've seen. I'm a native-Cantonese speaker though (not Mandarin) so I can only assume that perhaps these voices hail from different parts of China/Taiwan?

Anyways, it has a nice story formula that has worked well in video games and classic Chinese stories. I couldn't help playing along out loud.

Although this DVD is for kids 3 and up, my two-year-old daughter certainly enjoys watching it and has learned quite a few words and phrases from it! My husband and I are also very impressed with this DVD. First, the storyline is very interesting, which holds my daughter's attention (and our attention). Plus, it's very interactive and engaging, getting kids involved in counting and naming body parts, colors, and fruits. Second, the characters are very appealing. It introduces positive role models that inspire kids to speak Chinese. Third, it utilizes several fun sing-along songs that reinforce new words and phrases. My daughter loves these tunes so much; she would sing them over and over. We've also tried to use these songs to teach her other new words. Fourth, the Chinese text is up on the screen, which helps kids to learn Chinese characters as well. Finally, we like the words review in the end and the introduction of Chinese culture and ancient capital city. As a Mandarin speaker myself, I highly recommend this DVD!

Journeys to the east "The river dragon king" had my 2 year old son speaking some mandaring words on the first day he watched it. The songs are catchy and emphasize the words being taught.

We bought "The adventures of Walker & PingPing" and "Ni Hao Kai-Lan: Super Special..." and both of these videos paled compared to "river dragon king" in the amount of vocabulary words taught and length of the video.

If you're seriously trying to get your child to learn basic Mandarin while having fun this is the video for them.
OR

I purchased this DVD to introduce my 3 year old daughter to Chinese. She likes it. It is an effective tool for presenting the sounds of the Chinese language but your child will not learn Chinese from repeated viewings. I have also purchased the Muzzy program in French at $120. Regardless of marketing, neither Muzzy nor Journeys to the East will teach your child a foreign language. But they are both more useful than an hour watching Dora the Explorer. For the money, Journeys to the East actaully exceeded my expectations. And, although there really are no functional alternatives to actually learn a language from a single DVD, you can do better than the crap kid shows they broadcast in order to sell cereal.

My 5-year-old and 3-year-old love the DVD. They have picked up quite a few simple phrases and use them during day-to-day activities.

This DVD's purpose is education first and entertainment second. The producers don't have the production $$$ that Nick Jr. has with Kai Lan, but your children will learn much more from this DVD than any Kai Lan DVD released to date.

I am very satisfied with this purchase.

As I'm trying to teach my son Chinese, the amount of Chinese vocabulary in a Chinese learning DVD is very important to me. With Journey to the East, I'm very impressed with the 50+ Chinese words in this video, which is much more than other videos on the market. In order for children to learn Chinese, they need to be exposed to as much Chinese as possible. The catchy songs and the fun adventure story also help greatly to interest my 3.5 year old son. He smiles whenever the songs start, and started humming them after only one viewing of the video. We were also able to discuss Chinese history when watching the part about Luo Yang and Terra Cotta Warrior. My father is from a city very close to Luo Yang, and we almost visited last time when we were in China. So it gave me a great chance to talk to my son about it, and got him all interested about his family's history.

Our 2 year old enjoys this, and it does go over body parts, a couple of colors and fruits, but geez the kids' voices are annoying. The songs also sound like someone is making them up on the fly. There is a lot of repetition, though, good for little kids.

My daughter is 18 months old and has been listening to Mandarin CD's in the car since she was about 4 months old. I purchased this CD for Christmas and after watching it a couple of times. My daughter started to count in Mandarin. I was surprised and then thought back to the songs. I guess this DVD put it all together for her. It's a great tool if you are looking to introduce your child to Mandarin. I can't wait for them to produce additional DVD's. I'm learning a bit of Mandarin also.

We adopted our daughter from China in March 2008 and in December she will be 3. We wanted her to learn Chinese but they don't teach it in our area until she is 5 and we didn't want to wait that long. We ordered Journeys to the East-The River Dragon King and she loves it. It has the numbers, food, body parts,colors and short phrases in Chinese. In the first week of watching the video she has already learned about 6 words. She is even correcting me in the pronunciation of the words. She seems to know the exact dialect of how the words are suppose to be spoken. This is a super video and I hope they come out with more.

I purchased this video for my 2-year-old to give her more exposure to Chinese. The video is a decent, if limitted and non-immersive language lesson, but the production values leave much to be desired. Honestly, aside from the language lesson structure, it looks and sounds like something a ten year old would put together. The animation is of poor quality, and while the voice actors pronouce everything correctly, their delivery is completely without affect and just plain annoying. Also, the video is only just over half an hour long. I was expecting a bit more.