Customer Reviews

Teach Me Chinese (Paperback and Audio CD): A Musical Journey Through the Day

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

 

 

I will attempt to give an objective review.
The good:
* Good concept: the book follows a little Chinese girl, Marie, throughout her day. On the way, you learn the Chinese words for family members, colors, clothing, body parts, days of the week, etc.
* Good Chinese pronunciation: Considering how many local dialects and accents there are in China, I am always concerned about pronunciation. I was pleased to find that the Chinese narrator speaks Mandarin with very good standard (Mainland Chinese) pronunciation. Note: standard Mandarin pronunciation in China and in Taiwan, though similar, have slight differences.
* Good English vocalists.

The bad:
* Poor Chinese vocalist: The narrator, who also does the singing, needs singing lessons! To be fair, she is not a terrible singer, she sings about as well as your average mom or grandma. But then again, your average mom or grandma would not be featured on a music CD, right? In several songs, she is off beat and off pitch.
* Hand-written book: Another thing I did not like is that the book is completely handwritten, so it is not very professional looking.
* Mistakes in the lyrics: I have found that the written Chinese lyrics do not always correspond to what is actually sung and some of the pinyin is incorrect.

Other neutral information:
* The songs are mostly standard western songs with make-shift translations. What bothers me is that many of the songs, such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," have had standard Chinese lyrics for decades, yet the version in this CD sounds as if someone just decided to make up new lyrics. The translation tends to be more or less a direct translation of the English, which is probably what was intended. However, this also means that some of the songs sound very strange in Chinese.
* The Chinese lyrics are written only in pinyin without any Chinese characters, so I had to write them out myself.

Do I recommend this product? Well, that depends on who you are. I believe that this product is useful in introducing VERY YOUNG children to the sound of the Mandarin language. Since young children are a very forgiving audience, they probably won't object to the high-pitched, occasionally out-of-tune vocal performance. My bilingual 3-year-old son loves the CD. So if you have children under 5 and if you believe you can tolerate the singing, I would recommend this product. The product states that it is for kids ages 2 to 12, but I seriously doubt that any child above five years of age will enjoy the music.

As Chinese-Americans, we want our daugther to learn the Chinese language from the very tender age. After listening to the "Teach Me French" tape from the same serie, (What a wonderful job they have done on that one!) we couldn't wait to get our hands on the Chinese version. However, it only turned out to be a major disappointment! We loved the ideas of teaching the phonics in Pin Yin and the format of printing both Pin Yin and the real characters in the book. However, rhyming is very unfortunaly lost in the translation. It is so plain and dull! In quite a lot of places, the words are not even "singable" at all. Besides, the singing is unberably out of pitch and the rhythm is majorly wrong in some songs. I hope they will get it redone. It is such a huge difference between the French version and this one! Go figure!

English part on this CD is awesome - both the background music and the voices sound professionally done. The problem with Chinese is not that the vocalists are bad - for the most part they sound decent - but no matter how good voice you may have if you keep on trying to squish 5 - 10 syllables into a beat of music that can accommodate harmoniously only one or two - it's not going to work.

The music on this CD was created to accommodate English verses. When these English verses got translated to Chinese, the number of Chinese syllables that has to fit into the same music constantly comes out as being either not enough or too much.

it makes me wonder if musicians who were involved in creating these songs didn't have ears to hear how bad the combination sounds, or they didn't care, or thought that kids for whom it was made, would either not notice or care.

This recording could've been done beautifully if instead of using popular western music to accompany Chinese verses, they picked perhaps some Chinese music.

(...)

The idea of recording Chinese language children's songs is great, but unfortunately the music on this CD is terrible. The singing sounds like a bad female impersonator, and the music sounds like super-cheapo eletric organ samples. It's almost unbearable to listen to. My spouse who speaks chinese says the pronounciation was unrecognizable, maybe because of the very high pitched voice.

I hope someone else will give this idea a second try and use native chinese speaking children to sing and professional musicians for the music.

We've owned this CD for 2 years now and we listen to it often. My son is now 2 years old and his Chinese daycare teacher is constantly amazed at how well he is picking up Chinese. She tells me that he is learning Chinese much better than the other non-Chinese children. She has asked me more than once if we speak Chinese with him at home. No, we don't! However, I play the "Teach me Chinese", "Teach me More Chinese" and "Sing 'n Learn Chinese" CD's in our car all the time. That's the only Chinese my son hears outside of daycare.

I agree that the Chinese singing voice is a bit weak. I've heard other Chinese music, and it seems to be a quality of Chinese singing to have a high-pitched, nasal sound. The voice on this CD is no different. We got over that hurdle after about 1 week. Just like any new music that you don't really like the first time you hear it, it somehow grows on you. Now I listen to it and it sounds normal. There is also Chinese dialog spoken by children. The songs are all sung in English as well (mostly), and the English singing voices are very pleasant.

A side effect of using the Teach Me Chinese CD's to teach my son Chinese is that I'm starting to pick it up too! I can sing several of the Chinese songs completely from memory now.

If you are serious about giving your child Chinese as their second language, I would definitely recommend the 'Teach me Chinese' series.

This book and tape set was somewhat of a disappointment. The female vocalist in the audio recording valiantly attempts to sing Chinese lyrics to familiar American children's tunes. In this case it just doesn't work. The lyrics sound like they were "squeezed" into the music. Many of the tunes are completely out of rhythm. My children were also turned off by the singer's voice which is somewhat high pitched and grating. It would have been nice if the songs were set to Chinese melodies instead of western tunes. When learning a foreign language why not also learn the music of that culture as well?

i am a native Mandarin speaker and have a BA in English. i've been a Mandarin instructor for adults and children for the past 12 years.

Positive: CD comes with book inlcuding lyrics in SOME of the songs. Book's illustration has many pictures along with the Pin yin for the songs. kids can use the pics in the pages for coloring.

Negative: Some of the songs are wrongly translated... like "The More we get Together Song". That's why previous comments mentioned how the songs when translated into Mandarin, do not rhyme. Lyrics are not printed for ALL the songs on the CD.

Other comments:
I wonder why are there English songs in the CD too? I understand why they have the songs in English then translated into Mandarin with the same tune. But some songs are only in English.

I want to add that some previous comments mentioned the "high pitch" voice of the female singer. As a native Mandarin speaker, i feel that is normal how children songs are sung in Mainland China. Its a folksy style which is very common... No, that's not how Mandarin is spoken (high pitch/ squeeky etc) But if you compare with nursery rhymes in English, you will notice a distinct difference in them too - they are usually sung with a certain accent or tone. We do not speak English like the way they were sang in songs.

the idea of using the tune of English nursery songs is a good because it may encourage children of non-native Mandarin background to feel familar and hence interested to learn the songs. Unfortunately, in this case, it was a poor attempt or it has not been proofed?

Eg. the song "Are you sleepng" - there is a chinese version which i learnt as a kid. the song is called "San zhi lao hu" translated as "3 tigers". instead of using san zhi lao hu's lyrics to the song, the translator translate word for word "Are you sleeping" from English to Mandarin which resulted in forcing syllables to cramp into the original notes.

I would have to modify many parts of the book to suit learning.

I have limited resources where i teach - cant use a dvd player either. so i bought this, based on previous reviews and whats available.

would i recommend this? Only if you have no other better alternatives.

THis is a wonderful way to learn beginning chinese- this set uses familiar children songs to help teach. Its usage of these fun familiar songs helps make it easier to memorize the language and retain it ! Just sing and follow along!!

I got this hoping it'd help me improve my Mandarin since I only know Cantonese Chinese. It was a great disappointment.

The audio portion is lovely, but the book that accompanies it is poorly organized. It does not contain all the lyrics in Chinese characters, and you need to flip back and forth in the book to get the "additional lyrics" in pinyin. The English translations are in the back of the book, so you cannot cross-reference meanings easily either.

The pictures and vocabulary words in between each singing section are cute and useful, but I would not recommend this CD and book set to anyone wanting to learn Mandarin Chinese.

My kids screamed, "Turn it off! Please!" They could not stand listening to the very high pitched and out of tune voice. Needless to say, Teach me Chinese did not work for my children. I have had better luck with Sing 'n Learn Chinese.