Customer Reviews

Learn Chinese Now! 9.0

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

 

 

I have struggled through several introductory chinese language products, and to date this has been the most useful for conversational development. It is not a full integrated course, in that it is conversation and pinyin, but even my Chinese friends consider that a good beginning. It has an amazing collection of learning methods in an inexpensive package.

Chinese is extremely difficult to start. It has taken me many hours to get get down the most basic phrases. I found this, along with the Pimsleur programs to be the most helpful.

This software is not for the complete beginner. If you are a complete beginner, try Beginner's Chinese by Yong Ho and/or the pricey Ultimate Mandarin Chinese (ISBN 0517708779) instead. The software has 4 'chapters,' two being in the 'beginner' level and the other two being in the 'intermediate' level. The chapters consist of dialogues that are rendered in Pinyin only (NO Chinese characters are used). You can listen to the dialogue and follow along with the Pinyin; you can also click on the Pinyin and the program will display the definition of the word/character. Except for one chapter which contains Chinese survival phrases, all the other chapters are better suited for a college student of Chinese than it is for the person who is doing self-study or one who is a complete beginner. The dialogues are in fact very interesting because they explore various aspects of Chinese culture, but one would have to have one semester of college Chinese before being able to appreciate it; after 2 semesters of college Chinese, one could probably understand 40-50% of the dialogue without looking at the translation; after 4 semesters (that is, two years of college Chinese), one could understand most of the simpler dialogues, but the software is still a very good tool for developing listening skills. Overall, if you are a complete beginner, skip this software; if you are taking college/high school Chinese, and you plan to stick with it either by taking more classes or doing serious self-study, then this software is definitely valuable as a supplement; and I would highly recommend it.

P.S. The grammar section and the Pinyin guide is so basic and lacking in substance that it is basically worthless.

Hi I'm an English teacher who teaches English as a Second Language (ESL) to students in China. Before starting this job I took a Madarin Chinese class and found it very hard. I got this program and using it helped me immensly. I was able to put into practice what I learned in class through this program. This provided excellent practice in pronunciation and contains a very large vocabulary section. The games and media were very good tools to practice and learn with, especially Vocabulous, my favorite game. After the class, when I was in China, I still used this program to help keep my language skills sharp and to expand my knowledge of it. Chinese Now is a very good learning program and it works.

I bought this CDROM after I read all the good reviews here.
In my opinion, the method is not that effective.
And it is not thorough since the Chinese caracters are simply ignored.
Maybe the best way to use it is as a secondary source of training, but not more.
Further, like all the CDROM based language method I have tried, the overall design is outdated. But again, this is not specific to LearnChineseNow9.0.

This program uses only pinyin - no Chinese characters - however Transparent Language has a very decent program for leaning Chinese characters called "Power Chinese" and even though that program teaches you only how to read and write simplified characters, the information is presented in a fun way through playing games and puzzles. One of the programs for learning how to write traditional, or rather, long form of characters is Easy Chinese Tutor (also available through amazon.com).

On the good side with Learn Chinese Now, you can click on every word separately to hear it pronounced slowly (and you can also check your own pronounciation by recording it) - when you got the word, you can click to hear an entire sentence at a normal speed or listen to an entire segment.

The program does have pictures, but they are not really related to the material, so don't expect to see people who are involved in a dialogue actually speaking to each other (as if you were watching a movie) - the only thing you'll find here is several slides.

After learning some basic words and expressions, the program leaps to an intermediate / advanced level and if this is the only program you're using, this leap may feel too much - even though yes, you can still click to hear each word separately.

The program contains as a bonus CD - Unitype, which has two programs Global Office and Global Writer. Global Office will expire after about 15 days, and you'll have to actually purchase to continue using it; Global Writer will still be functional and you can use it to write / type Chinese characters - although I personally much prefer NJStar. In order to use these programs to type Chinese characters, you input characters in pinyin, but you still have to know how the character you desire to use looks like in Chinese, since you'll be offered a selection of characters which are all written in the same way in pinyin (without the use of tonal accents).

I picked up version 8 of this at a store. The box said it works with Mac OS 8 and up, but did not specify OS X. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a native application (carbonised) for OS X, so I did not have to run it inside of the Classic environment, like I do with a couple other chinese apps I have. So that is one big plus for it.

I find that it is a very good supplement to my college text book and other chinese apps. No one app (or book) can be the best at everything, but this comes pretty close. Not great at learning characters, the strength was in learning PinYin and vocabulary. This is version 8.1 I'm talking about, not version 9.

This is an amazing software.
I can enhance my vocabruary and correct my pronounciation through recording my voice and compare with the native pronounciatin on the PC. This is very helpful to learn new language. And also, my version came with bonus CD which includes multiple languages word processor.
Considering the price, this has very high cost performance and I strongly recommend this software to lean Chinese.

I have this program and I am not impressed. It looks to me like the series existed and they just tried to make a Chinese version. The games and exercises don't work well for chinese. If you want to learn by memorizing dialogs that don't reflect everyday situations, this is for you.

To get any use out of this as a beginner, I had to copy down the words and phrases and make flashcards on my own. There is no vocabulary drill, no vocabulary builder pages etc. I couldn't believe anyone buys this.
I also have listened to pimsleur which is great. Another good though pricey piece of software is Wenlin.

Wow, this package is really hard. If you are a beginner, stay away. This package is a lot harder than Ultimate Mandarin. I consider myself intermediate, but this package blew me away. Anyway, other package like Rosetta stone chinese is pretty .... VocabuLearn is also a lot .... This package has tons of vocabulary which is much better than VocabuLearn Chinese. This package is much better than in a chinese classroom because you can listen one word by one word for pronunciation. Anyway, ChineseNow is very similar to a classroom experience, except that their vocabularies and sentences are very very difficult. If transparentlanguage company uses easy vocabularies with the same effort, I think they will be much more successful. Why? Because in ChineseNow, they worked very hard and put a lot of effort in producing this CD, but I just think that they are targetting the wrong audience. For me, after one year of Conversation Mandarin, I am starting on Ultimate Mandarin which this will cost me another year. Then, I will attack this ChineseNow CD again. This ChineseNow is one serious material, just too hard...

Chinese Now is an excellent program for language learning. I am more than satisfied by its effetiveness and what it has to offer as a product. I found that it has very few flaws and is for all ability level speakers. Chinese is a hard language to learn and so far this program is the best method I have found for myself. Its a 5-star program and a good buy!