Mandarin Chinese Travel Pack [Audio CD]

Berlitz Guides (Creator)

Book Description

Series: Travel Pack | Publication Date: February 1, 2003

Berlitz has made language learning enjoyable and accessible for students, travelers, and language lovers the world over. Whether you'd like to gently dabble in a language or speak like a native, Berlitz Publishing offers more than 1,000 titles in multiple languages.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

In January 2003, the renowned Berlitz Publishing became part of the Langenscheidt Group. The Langenscheidt Publishing Group, the premier group of map and travel companies, offers over 4,000 North American and international street maps, road maps, atlases, language-learning, bilingual dictionaries, and travel-related products covering countries, cities, and languages in every continent.

Product Details

• Audio CD: 224 pages
• Publisher: Berlitz Publishing; Abridged edition (February 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9812462031
• ISBN-13: 978-9812462039
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,482,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars mandarin trvel pk, December 12, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Mandarin Chinese Travel Pack (Audio CD)

Compared to berlitz edition in cassette tape years ago, this CD edition does not have many things to praise:
While the whole world use PINYN to help foreigners pronounce Chinese words and phrases, Berlitz keeps on using strange notations, perhaps to facilitate the reading of Cantonese, but not mandarin.
The previous cassette edition showed the pronunciation and intonation more Beijing-like.
In the previous cassette edition, there were more/longer pause, so the student could repeat the chinese phrase at ease.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars poorly put together, February 6, 2006

By 

BQ "BQ-JP" (Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mandarin Chinese Travel Pack (Audio CD)

While this book and CD offer a basic introduction to Mandarin, the Berlitz people have thoughtlessly broken up this hour-long CD over only eight tracks. This is terribly inconvenient if you want to work on a small section at a time. Also, the first section includes all the introductory material--the jaunty song, etc.--so you have to listen to one and a half minutes of junk before the actual lessons begin. If they had put this material on a track by itself, the user could skip it on repeated listens. Surely the Berlitz people know how language learners are likely to use their audio materials. Why then did they not take the simple step of breaking this material into more easily accessible pieces? This is a thoughtlessly put together product and poor language learning pedagogy to boot.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An incredible mistake, June 22, 2007

By 

Colin McLarty (Chardon, OH USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mandarin Chinese Travel Pack (Audio CD)

This phrase book will not work in China. The phonetic spellngs are given without tones. That is more or less like leaving out the vowels when you tell someone how to pronounce words in English.

The book actually tells you that "in reality" Mandarin is spoken with tones (p. 7). But it says the tones are hard and so they are left out here. The tones are also necessary. So this book teaches a new made-up version of Mandarin that will not work "in reality."