Customer Reviews

Power Chinese (DVD Case)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This program definitely deserves a review. I found it so much fun to work with that I stayed up all night, as long as I could keep my eyes open. It feels more like playing the game than investing an effort in learning. It is beautifully structures - it seems just to be made perfect for Western minds, or rather for people who have short time span.

The program teaches grammar, too, in a way that seems more like watching a commercial on TV. It is offered in easily digestable bits, which are immediately followed through practice that is structured just like playing a game.

New characters are introduced throughout the program and through the exercises. Information about every Chinese character is available throughout the program. All you need to do is click on the character you don't know, or that you might have forgotten, to see how it's written (stroke order and count, which are by the way, very colorful), to hear it pronounced, or to check out the pinyin spelling. You never feel stuck.

Some characters are "deconstructed" to provide some possible logic that may help in memorizing the character. There are also few cultural bits and pieces, and even videos with people who have mastered the ability to speak Chinese fluently - for motivation and encouragement. The program is really good throughout in taking the stress out of learning Chinese characters, in making it as easy and enjoyable as possible and in motivating you to keep going.

I have studied several foreign languages, and used various learning tools along the way. None of them can compare to the Power Chinese program. I have been amazed at how fun and effective this program is at teaching mandarin. Nothing about this program feels like work. I look forward to sitting down with this program every day and adding to my beginner's knowledge of chinese. I never thought learning Mandarin could be as easy as this program has made it. The program is very effective at building your knowledge of the language step by step, in a way where each lesson builds on the previous one. My retention level has been extremely high on everything I have studied so far. Unlike many programs that simply teach through a "flash card" or memorization approach, Power Chinese teaches through an interactive learning method. Each section covers a small amount of material, but makes sure that you know it thoroughly before moving on to the next lesson. I have only had the software for a couple of weeks, and I am amazed at how much of the language I understand already. Also, the price for this system can't be beat, and it even includes a rebate. If you want to learn mandarin, buy this product.

I love this program. It's visually entertaining, and the text is entertaining, too. The author has a sense of humor. You click on a shivery little button (the buttons jiggle until you click on them), and read some humorously phrased piece of information. Each page is like an adventure game where you click on things and learn some surprising new fact. Plus the material is very clearly and logically presented - in addition to being entertaining.

I know that some people think that you should just jump into speaking without understanding anything, but I have an analytical turn of mind, and I like understanding stuff. That said, I don't want to be overwhelmed and bored with technical grammatical terminology. This program balances explanation and practice perfectly. For example, in an exercise to learn Chinese sentence structure, you rearrange pictures (e.g. of a man, and eye to represent "see") in the order a Chinese would say it.

I could go on and on about how much I like this program, but I think you get the idea. I went to the Transparent Web site to see what else they have, and ended up downloading the free version - and then buying the enhanced version - of "Before You Know It - Chinese". It's an excellent electronic flashcard program with a clever design that allows you to add modules.

Power Chinese is elegant, well-done software - a great self-teaching tool to learn Chinese. People always talk about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone... They should be talking about Power Chinese!!

This program definitely deserves a review. I found it so much fun to work with that I stayed up all night, as long as I could keep my eyes open. It feels more like playing the game than investing an effort in learning. It is beautifully structures - it seems just to be made perfect for Western minds, or rather for people who have short time span.

The program teaches grammar, too, in a way that seems more like watching a commercial on TV. It is offered in easily digestable bits, which are immediately followed through practice that is structured just like playing a game.

New characters are introduced throughout the program and through the exercises. Information about every Chinese character is available throughout the program. All you need to do is click on the character you don't know, or that you might have forgotten, to see how it's written (stroke order and count, which are by the way, very colorful), to hear it pronounced, or to check out the pinyin spelling. You never feel stuck.

Some characters are "deconstructed" to provide some possible logic that may help in memorizing the character. There are also few cultural bits and pieces, and even videos with people who have mastered the ability to speak Chinese fluently - for motivation and encouragement. The program is really good throughout in taking the stress out of learning Chinese characters, in making it as easy and enjoyable as possible and in motivating you to keep going.

Asthetics aside, the program runs great, and wouldn't you know it, actually does as advertised. Being sub-beginner mandarin student if such a catagory existed, and even I took alot away from this. Great buy, all around.

First off, with respect to the compatibility issues, a quick stop at www.transparent.com shows that the program must run at 1024x768 or at 800x600. This is unfortunate, and it is annoying to have to change my monitor's resolution, but it seems a small price for an interesting and useful program.



Pimsleur is a great tool for learning the spoken language and the pronunciation. Where it falls down is the lack of additional resources if you're not sure what you're hearing. This program provides those resources in spades. You get to see the actual Chinese characters, as well as their pinyin equivalents. This makes it much easier to validate your ears. The ability to see the stroke order for characters adds to the value of the program.



The examples and exercises are excellent. The discussion of the progression of the Chinese characters for king, jade, and country (whether true or not) truly helps to "cement" those characters in your mind. The exercise where you see the character, play its sound, then position it under the correct table heading--depending on which of the four tones you hear--is extremely valuable. The same can be said for the exercises in which you must select which consonant you are hearing. This ear training, combined with the visual link to the characters and the pinyin, adds a great deal of clarity to the learning process.



Since I'm already using the Pimsleur CD's, I cannot say whether or not Power Chinese is adequate to stand on its own as a Chinese language learning tool. I can definitely say that it augments Pimsleur quite nicely.

This program only accepts two resolutions to run it. 1024 X 768 and 600 X 800. Because I have a widescreen laptop, it is a huge pain to adjust my screen to these settings.
The program looks like it was created for Windows 95 and was updated minimally to be compatable with XP.
Contentwise, it looks pretty good and does a good job of teaching in my opinion. However, if you don't want to mess with the settings on your computer, I would suggest finding a different program.

I got this product based mainly on the positive reviews that I see for it here. I guess that I am just the dissenting voice...I think that overall, I would not buy this product again. I definitely would not recommend it to others. Why?

1. Compatibility:
Others have mentioned that it has a hard time with modern machines. Others have indignantly replied that the manufacturer specifies which screen resolution must be used. You are both correct--to use the program properly, you will likely have to change your screen resolution. There are some ways around this--I got mine to work in a high res mode, but it took some jiggering to do it. And lets face it--for about 50 bucks, I expect my programs to figure out what my machine's default resolution is, and to adjust themselves to it. This was not the case when the program was written, true, but it is definitely time to upgrade/support this software a little if it is to remain a viable, marketable product. This issue alone should not dissuade you from getting this software, but definitely added to my dissatisfaction.

2. Poor production values:
This is once more related to the fact that this program is (by software standards) quite old. It was made in 2004, and the resolution of the drawings, the style of animations, the overall look and feel of the product is dated. It looks almost as if it were designed for a DOS type environment, although I am sure that it was not.

3. Lessons that are too simple:
There is a lot of reading in the program. That is not a bad thing...but instead of including the text in a simple manner, you have to hit all these little jiggly "more" or "note" or "explain" buttons to get all the text. This wouldn't be so bad, but the text boxes that pop up all require using their clunky scroll bars. All of this is inconvenient. But the kicker is that you frequently spend a lot of time doing this to get one salient fact out of the program--very very simple concepts that didn't need a ton of bizarre explication to try to get you to remember it.

4. Lessons that are way too hard:
There are a number of drills here that are just right--the tone drill is very useful to beginners, and the drill for the verb "to be" is pretty good. However, on a number of occasions, you are suddenly asked to translate complete English sentences into Chinese. That is a great task, one that I would love to complete--but they didn't get you to the point that you would be able to complete this task before you were expected to do it. A **lot** of Chinese characters are thrown around within dialogues--but are not taught to you in any gradual fashion. I suppose that you could learn them all by right clicking them (to get their translation), making your own flash cards, learning them, and then return to the program to participate in the translation exercises. However, once more, for 50 bucks, I expect the program to lead me by the hand down the garden path--using matching games or something similar to help us to remember the characters and their corresponding meanings. They spend screens and screens explaining to you hte history of about 10 characters (which I actually then learned!) but then expect you to somehow pick up the other approximately 590 words they use in the program. This is an odd and inconvenient distribution of difficulty.

5. No way to practice writing the characters themselves within the program: the program does not allow you to learn stroke order, and does not allow you to practice your Chinese characters yourself within the program. Boo.

6. Pinyin support somewhat spotty:
Pinyin is often, but somewhat randomly available. You don't get a chance to write/type in pinyin either.

There are some things I liked:
1. Translation of every word: you can right click on almost any chinese character in the program, and a pronunciation and an english translation are usually available to you. This is a very nice feature.

Ok, I guess there was just one thing I liked.

I did go through this entire program, and I feel that I walked away with some very good information. It was somewhat complementary to Pimsleur in that some of the vocabulary overlaps, but that will be the case with just about every beginning Chinese program.

I have also tried Rosetta stone (3.5 stars from me), and fluenz (3.5-4 stars from me), and this one is definitely not as good as either of those programs. Of course, you spend more on those programs---but in this case, the 50 dollars or so you spend on this program should have been about $10-15 to make it worthwhile. If you can pick up a copy of this used for the 10 dollar price range...well, it is probably worth your while. Otherwise, save your money for a better program. Or better yet, try Chinesepod, which is pretty much what this program should have been, but was unable to accomplish.

Power Chinese is relatively inexpensive introduction to the chinese language.If you devote enough time to study you will learn the same language skills that more expensive DVDs may teach you.

This is a great program with practical phrases that you can repeat as you need to. I would recommend it to anyone who just wants to pick up enough Chinese to get by on a visit.