Customer Reviews

Making Connections: Enhance Your Listening Comprehension in Chinese (Traditional Character Edition) (Chinese Edition)

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

 

 

This book could have been a great help to Chinese language students. However, the author took the easy way out by providing conversational Chinese on CDs with no text in Chinese, pin yin, or English translation.

The Chinese dialogue is done in a normal (fast to the non-Chinese ear) speed with many words merged together which makes it difficult for a student to distinguish which word and tone is being spoken.

The author could have included the dialogue in Chinese and pin yin, with an English translation at the back of the book. This would give the student the opportunity to check his understanding when working alone.

The author admits that lacking the above helpful aids may be "frustrating." What an understatement.

I eventually had a Chinese friend transcribe the conversationsal dialogue into Chinese. From this, I was able to get a clear understanding of the CDs. For those who do not have this option, the CDs without corresponding text is not very helpful.

Either laziness, poor judgement, or lack of money prevented this text and CDs from being a better tool for learning Chinese.

Unless one's aural Chinese is very good, you can skip this text and CD. A better buy is the "Integrated Chinese" and CDs by Yuehua Liu and Tao-chung Yao from www.cheng-tsui.com.

This book's purpose is to improve listening comprehension at an early level rather than waiting until later, and it fulfills that purpose nicely. The dialogues are enjoyable to listen to, and are at a normal speaking rate without being too fast or using too large a vocabulary. The text is used to test listening comprehension. Basically, this is how Chinese is really spoken, and if you want to advance to the next level you would do well to buy this book/cd package.

If the author had provided transcripts, it would have been too easy to cheat, and you wouldn't really gain, because of course you can easily follow along if the words are right in front of you right? And in that case, this book would be like many others already out there and really add nothing new to the genre. The dialogues weren't left out due to laziness, after all this is a 300-page book already.

I found this to be a great book and the dialogues really are not that difficult, and provide a nice challenge for the level. Glad I bought it.

It's unfortunate that there are only two (now three) reviews for this book/CD set, because it really does fill a much needed gap in resources for beginning and intermediate level students. I consider myself an low-intermediate level student; I lived in Taiwan and China but not long enough to really gain "fluency." The thing is, normal people in China don't talk like your textbook; in fact, there is much more of a spontaneous flow to conversations including pauses, affirmations, comprehension checks and etc. I do sympathize with the person who wanted a text version of the listening, but think of it this way: this much more accurately reflects the actual experience of speaking and listening in China-- except you get the option of listening to it again!

Highly recommended. It would be nice to see a text version put out over the internet, though.