Customer Reviews

Ultimate Chinese (Mandarin) Beginner-Intermediate (CD/Book) (Ultimate Beginner-Intermediate)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The only portion this series misses is the written, but that's not what they were aiming for. I have lived in Shanghai and traveled to various parts of China. The voices on CD are very realistic and relaxed, helping the student to understand ordinary speakers - rather than the "standard" Beijing pronunciation. I urge students to use the CD's alot along with the instructions. I found the grammar explanations far superior to any other text I have seen out there- and through 2 years of formal training and 2 practical (in the street) I have not seen a more balanced approach to subject and grammar (Much better than Pimsleur). My wife is Chinese and agrees with the points I have made here. She said there was a definite improvement after I studied these CD's (as opposed to my classroom instruction - not the teacher's fault though, in case she reads this).
Hope this helps!

I've been using Ultimate Mandarin Chinese for about three months now, and have gotten through about two-thirds of the course. The recordings are very clear, the book is very simple (no graphics or fancy stuff), but with comprehensive grammar explanations, some homework, and lots of useful dialogs and vocabulary.

If you complete the book and learn every lesson well, you can expect to be at the mid-intermediate level of speaking/understanding. You will know about 1500-2000 words, and you will be able to discuss pretty much any subject, although nothing in much depth. You'll also have a slight Beijing accent, and you'll have some brief exposure to Chinese daily life customs, and mainland Chinese culture. The book does not cover the southern accent or Taiwanese/Singaporean/etc. culture.

Although the book is marketed as beginner-intermediate, it moves very quickly. By lesson 15, the dialogs are spoken at a very fast, conversational pace, and the vocabulary starts to become specialized far beyond the standard tourist fare. The dialogs are excellent for listening comprehension because of the speed, while the vocabulary is pretty extensive. The book is also very grammar heavy, which serves as an excellent complement to Pimsleur Comprehensive Mandarin, which is heavy on speaking skills, but not grammar.

Where the course suffers, however, is in the voice actors, the editing, and the lack of writing. One of the male voice actors has a terrible, nearly incomprehensible accent that sounds awkward and foreign (he is the male speaker in Lesson 15), and each of the lessons that he's featured on is rather painful to the ear. I suspect that is not a native speaker of Mandarin and that, moreover, he is not a trained voice actor. Secondly, the editing of the text is rather poor--there are a number of typos, mostly with tone marks. Thirdly, the course is written almost entirely in pinyin, with only about 200-300 characters in the whole book. I have gotten around this problem by transcribing the pinyin into MSWord IME with the appropriate Simplified Characters, but this is a bit of a hassle, especially given the number of Chinese homonyms.

Overall, I think this is a great course, especially when used in conjunction with other materials (i.e., Pimsleur, Chinese in a Flash cards). With the inclusion of Hanzi and some edits, I think it could be even better. I don't think that it's the ultimate one-stop-shop for Mandarin language learning, but it is certainly worth the price and more.

This is a good, thorough introduction to spoken Mandarin Chinese. The dialogues contain pertinent, everyday vocabulary, there is enough grammar to make it possible to comprehend how the sentences are constructed. There are two sets of CD tracks for each lesson. One set helps you practice the dialogues and vocabulary, and the other explains grammar, although I would recommend reading the full grammar explanations in the chapters as well as listening to the recorded ones. I find this book and CD set pleasant to use and easy to follow.

This a great set to start out with, it stresses speaking more than anything but you learn to read and write about 200 characters.
The 2 sets of CDs are great in that one is for use with the text, although I wish more of the text was available on the CDs but you also receive a second set of CDs that are for studying on the run.
The set is great because you get amazing practice with tones and vocabulary and of course you learn about 5 characters per lesson, with 40 lessons in all. I really like the set and will use it even during the school year for reviewing grammar rules and conversations.
All in all, worth even the full $79.95 despite one reviewer stating it's confusing, it is set up like a non-intensive 1 semester college elementary Mandarin class. Well organized and easy to follow and learn from. I'd suggest it as a supplement to your college class too!

This program aims to do what a college course would, and I think it succeeds at that. It teaches conversation, with much grammar, and some reading and writing of Chinese. After using it for a week (from the library) I decided not to stay with it. Right now I want much more focus on conversation, and in fact on conversation useful on a first trip to China. And I want to use only "on the go" audio. This program aims at a more thorough knowledge of Chinese spoken and written than I hope for right now -- so I want to be clear I am not faulting the series. It depends on what you want.

I have decided to go with the Pimsleur CDs (Pimsleur worked well for me in German, and Italian). As an example of the difference: Living Language starts out teaching you how to ask someone about their family, while Pimsleur starts out teaching you how to ask if someone speaks English. I have one year to prepare for one week in Beijing. It is absolutely certain that I will sometimes need to find someone who speaks English, and it is unlikely I will ask many people about their family life. Again this is not to fault the different goals of the Living Language program.

Pimsleur is an audio-only course, entirely suitable for use while driving, and by design they teach you nothing about written Chinese. And they have very little explicitly on grammar or pronunciation. You are supposed to get those from immersion. I am supplementing them with Chinesepod downloads which are even faster paced immerison than Pimsleur but also come with written material so they are not *only* immersion. This is the balance I want right now.

I looked at a number of reviews on the popular Rosetta Stone offering and even tried their demo version. In the end, however, I opted for the Living Language - Ultimate Chinese package. I was not sure if the total immersion approach would work for me. I felt that I wanted to learn more about the syntax and semantics of the language than what Rosetta Stone appeared to offer. Being unsure of whether I would make the commitment to doing the exercises, cost was an important issue.

The Living Language package is no where close to Rosetta Stone in terms of its slick user interface. However, the book makes it easy to study when you don't have access to a computer or CD player. The alternate "on the road" CDs, which intermix some of the English in the book with the spoken Chinese, are handy when you're in a cramped airplane seat and can't quite open your laptop. I don't have a CD player at home or in my car, but assume that they would be ideal there, as well.

I have heard the commercials about Rosetta Stone being the best but given its approach, use in other environments, and its cost, I am quite pleased with my choice of the Living Language package.

At one time or another, I briefly studied German, Spanish, Russian and Latin so I am not new to learning a language. Notice I said "studied." I no longer know those languages except for some Spanish phrases.

I planned to go to China and wanted to learn some common phrases in Mandarin. So I signed up with a tutor who helped me learn the four tones for all the consonants and vowels sounds which is an important 1st step. Then I bought the Ultimate Mandarin book with the CD's to study on my own for six months on and off before my trip.

Mandarin is quite difficult because so many of the sounds don't exist in English compared to a language like Spanish. Also, unlike Spanish and other Western languages there are no significantly sounding similar words in Mandarin and English that sound and mean the same.

Although I enjoyed trying to speak Mandarin and like the sound of it I didn't like the way Ultimate Mandarin book and CD's worked. I think they are too difficult because the sentence structure in some exercises were too complex and longer than necessary for a beginner in Mandarin.

Other areas that I didn't like:

(1) The book or CD's don't specifically provide practice for all the possible sounds like my tutor made me do. Luckily, I had made a recording over several sessions with my tutor of the four tones for all the consonants and vowels that I could refer to when studying on my own. You only get to know some of them during the initial chapters.

(2) The Chinese on the CD's usually spoke very fast and I couldn't pick up the tones let alone the words. The exercises in the book are printed out in Pinyin, however, it is an approximation for Mandarin. Learning the Pinyin pronunciation of characters are difficult too. To help overcome my problems, I used Audacity freeware to edit the CD's lessons to MP3's files so I could slow the speaking rate to my level of understanding and more easily follow the written Pinyin exercises.

(3) The exercises for each chapter do not have all the vocabulary meanings in English at the end of each chapter or at the back of the book's master list. Instead many definitions are only explained in other chapters. Many are left out of the master list at the back of the book. The only way to find them, if possible at all, was to search the chapter table of contents. Although the English translation is provided for each Pinyin statement it wasn't always clear to me because the word order can be different between the languages. It was more useful to me to look up a word definition rather than use the English statement. I had to buy a Mandarin-English dictionary to help solve this serious deficiency in the book. This was very poor planning on the part of the editors of Ultimate Mandarin and aggravated me. We all have different methods of learning and Ultimate Mandarin did work well for me.

For a poor dumb language student such as myself, Ultimate Mandarin was too advanced and needlessly difficult. I did use the demo versions of Rosetta Stone and Before You Know It. I liked to use them in conjunction with the Ultimate Mandarin but I think at least for me, if I could have afforded to stay with a very patient tutor or have someone to talk with in Mandarin every day that would have been better in my situation.

So what happened during my trip to China? The few phrases I managed to remember, I was told that I was understandable. At other times, I confused and puzzled the Chinese I met. For instance, I did have a good laugh at myself at one restaurant when I was brought a bowl of hot water then another bowl of thin watery soup. I never figured out what I did wrong!

I have some experience with Mandarin (my mom speaks it fluently) and decided to pick up this course to brush up on my skills. By the time I reached chapter 3, I was extremely grateful for my previous exposure (home, high school and college) because of problems with the book. For example, in chapter 3, the dialog includes the following words: kan4, qu4, tui4 xiu1, yi3 hou4, jia1 ren2, da4 xue2. The problem is the words are in the English translation of the dialog but are not included in the vocabulary section of the lesson. Since Chinese grammar isn't always the same as English grammar, it can be challenging to determine the definition based upon context. This can be frustrating to a beginner.

There's one sentence in chapter 3 that reads, "wo3 mei4mei da4xue2 bi4yi4 yi3hou4, xiang3 xue2xi2 yi1shu4". When translated literally it reads, "My younger sister college graduated later, wants to study medicine." The actual English translation in the book is, "When my younger sister graduates from college, she is thinking about studying medicine." Because the word yi3hou4 is missing from the vocabulary section, there's no way to determine which word it represents in the English translation. The word actually means "later" or "after" but is used to represent the word "when" in the sentence. How is a beginner supposed to know this?

I realize that this is just in chapter three, but I found a similar issue in chapter 2. So based upon 2 chapters in the book, I can only assume that I will see more problems.

If you decide to buy this course, be prepared to use other resources, dictionaries, Internet, or friends to help you understand some of the lessons.

I bought this product a few months ago and started learning on my own. I wanted to up the amount I was learning, so I began taking weekly lessons with a Chinese instructor. She was amazed at how much I had learned in such a short time. It helped with the vocabulary and pronounciation. I now use both and have doubled my learning ability. I needed to do this, as I only have a short time to learn. For someone who is not in such a hurry, this product is perfect!

This is my first intro to chinese and I bought it based on the prior reviews which I've found to be accurate. I'm only a quarter of the way into the book and am very pleased with the level of instruction. As with any new language it's also good to at least take a basic course with an instructor to ferret out your misunderstandings. It is lacking in character exposition, although there is some, but this is easily remedied by purchasing "reading & writing chinese : simplified character edition" . My only gripe in this area is that it would have been nice to see the characters next to the pinyin instead of having to refer to the character book or dictionary. There are two sets of cd's one in chinese only and one for the car in both chinese and the corresponding english translation. The speakers are clear and their accent sounds native. Chinese is so far the most difficult language I've attempted to learn but this set definitely takes the edge off and has improved my progress. Overall I'm very happy with this purchase and would recommend it to anyone just starting out.