Product Details

• Directors: Ana Leung
• Format: Animated, Closed-captioned, Color, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Language Tree
• DVD Release Date: February 25, 2004
• Run Time: 30 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0001MXPFO
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #274,067 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Research shows that children who learn foreign languages at an early age receive life-long benefits:

- Near-native fluency
- Better overall performance in school
- Greater career possibilities

Introduce your child to one of the most useful languages of the future – Mandarin Chinese. Learn Chinese with Billy and Benboo Vol. 1 teaches Mandarin Chinese to children in a fun and accessible manner. Filled with colorful images and modern sing-along songs, this video is sure to engage your child from start to finish. Billy and his cute Shih Tzu dog, Benboo will teach children (and parents) useful phrases and vocabulary words appropriate for everyday situations: meeting and greeting, bathing, eating, and much more. To help develop correct pronunciation, this video also explains pinyin tones in a truly unique and enjoyable way.

* Perfect for beginner students with no previous exposure to Mandarin Chinese.

* Narrated in English with dialogue spoken by native speakers from Mainland China. * Co-developed by a Stanford University Cognitive Scientist and an instructor of Chinese at UC Berkeley.

* Includes six complete lessons with phrase/vocabulary review and songs to reinforce the lessons.

* Accompanied with a support booklet in English, Chinese, and pinyin so parents can follow along and get involved in the teaching process

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor pedagogy, worse animation, June 20, 2005

By 

T. E. Donahue - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learn Chinese with Billy and Benboo, Beg. Level 1 Vol. 1 (DVD)

The video has a two major defects:
1. Bad pedagogy--the new chinese words are presented to children in sentences, instead of word-by-word or in phrases. So a child hears long strings of sound (which I guess they are just supposed to memorize!) with few clues about what each word means--or even where one word ends and another begins.
2. Poor animation (animation, of course, is always less effective than seeing a native speaker's mouth as you hear them pronounce--but the cartoons could have been used to capture children's attention: they don't.).
We purchased this video at the same time as the first Learn Chinese with Jade! video and found that to be an excellent introduction.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great language learning video, January 18, 2005

By 

John Chen (San Ramon, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Learn Chinese with Billy and Benboo, Beg. Level 1 Vol. 1 (DVD)

Billy and Benboo is a very charming introduction to Mandarin Chinese. As a Taiwanese American, I am very keen on exposing my 3-year old (who is half Irish) to Mandarin Chinese as often as possible.
There are not a lot of quality Chinese learning products in the market, so I'm glad I found this DVD on Amazon. My daughter loves watching this DVD. Her favorite character is Billy's cute Shih Tzu "Benboo". While she already speaks a little Chinese, watching this DVD seems to inspire her to speak more. She even tries to sing along with the songs (though they tend to be a little fast).
I appreciate that some of the voices on the DVD appear to have a Taiwanese accent and others have mainland Chinese accents. Most of the audio and video products I've seen focus on mainland Chinese pronunciation, but I feel demonstrating pronunciations from different regions would be beneficial to beginners.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Incorrect tones and pronunciations, January 14, 2005

By 

AVL - See all my reviews

This review is from: Learn Chinese with Billy and Benboo, Beg. Level 1 Vol. 1 (DVD)

My wife is from Beijing and is fluent in Mandarin. We purchased this tape for our son and were very disappointed with the inconsistencies of the speakers in correctly pronouncing the vocabulary. The pronunciation and tones were off in close to a third of the video. Although this video teaches vocabulary, it does not do a good job of teaching the correct pronunciation of the words.