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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful, December 23, 2002
I bought this with a bunch of other language materials so I could learn some minimal Vietnamese before going to Viet Nam.It was both more and less than I expected. It was "more" because the training scheme (what I would call "immersive drill and practice") was much more effective than I would have guessed. It was "less" because it makes no attempt to explain any grammar, explicitly define words used or describe things like the Vietnamese phonetic and tone system (they don't even mention which dialect they are teaching. I think it is a northern dialect). Because of this, I suspect you'll need to use this in addition to some other resource no matter what your goal is for learning the language. However, as as supplemental resource it is very good. The scheme used by this product is pretty simple. Each lesson (there are 22 lessons in this package) involves ten drills which collectively introduce some small set of words/ideas. Each drill contains four things (e.g. drill 1 has "girl", "boy", "cat", "dog". Drill 10 of lesson 2-11 has "The girls are not going to jump. The boy is going to jump", "The girls are not jumping. The boy is jumping", "The girls have not jumped. The boy has jumped", and "The boy and the girls are jumping"), and each thing has a photo, a written form and a spoken form. Basically, you can choose which form you want to be presented with (e.g. the spoken form) and which you want to pick the answer from (e.g. a photo). For each drill in a lesson, you are presented with one of the four things and then prompted with the four possibilities to pick the answer from, then you are presented with another one of the four things and prompted to answer, and so on. This means you get asked 40 questions in each lesson. On the surface, then, this is a simple drill-and-practice package. The drills, however, are organized to build on preceding ones so that you are able to progress from "a girl" to "The girls have not jumped. The boy has jumped." in the span of 22 lessons (220 drills). This also provides all the benefits of computerized drill-and-practice (tireless presentation, easy repetition, tracking of mistaken answers, and so on). Additionally, since this has the benefit of offering written, spoken and pictorial "modalities", it really helps one learn the material. Personally, I found it tremendously useful to be able to click the "play again" button over and over again when I was trying to hear exactly how a particular word was pronounced (something which is exceedingly cumbersome, at best, to do with audiotape). For the audio portions, there are two speakers (a man and a woman) who speak different drills, so you do get a little variation in speakers. The software also has a "listening" mode where it will play the audio phrases for you and record you saying the same thing back so you can compare your pronunciation with the audio (it also makes some attempt to offer a calculation of how close your pronunciation is, though I couldn't judge how good its automated judgment was). This seems promising, but I found it caused the program to crash on Mac OS X, and the interface was frustrating (for me) on OS 9 because I often misjudged when I was supposed to start speaking. There are also many features which I would have expected that this didn't have. Someone else mentioned that you can't print out the pictures or the drills as flash cards (there is a PDF file which contains the written sentences for all the lessons, so you can print that out). I was surprised that there was no way to search for words or phrases (e.g. show me all the drills where "red" is used), and they do not support writing/typing (which I know I would have benefitted from). The interface is sometimes a little cryptic (for some reason the company has chosen to put almost no text in the interface, so you need to learn what various strange icons mean in order to use it). It isn't clear to me whether I'll end up buying the Level 1 package, for it's current list price of [$$$] seems a little ... to me. For [$$$], this seems like a great supplement to a more traditional language text, and you would probably surprise yourself with how much you could learn with just this. Personally, I feel like the price/feature ratio was about right for my needs here.
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