Customer Reviews

Mandarin Chinese Travel Pack

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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.

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.

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."

For a Berlitz product this is very disappointing and nearly useless pack. My main issue is that Berlitz replaced the pinyin system with their own "simplified phonetic transcription. Nobody said Chinese is an easy language to learn, but if one follows Berlitz "simplified phonetic transcription" they are completely wasting their time and money!!