Product Details

• Directors: Ana Leung
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: Language Tree
• DVD Release Date: September 2, 2003
• Run Time: 25 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0000D8DJJ
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #86,681 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Language Tree introduces a breakthrough method for children to learn Mandarin Chinese. Billy and Benboo: The Monsters and the Magic Wand, teaches conversational Mandarin Chinese to children using an entertaining video storybook format that captures your child’s attention and imagination from start to finish. While your child follows the adventures of Billy and his cute shih-tzu dog Benboo, he or she will be learning useful phrases and vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese. This fun video depicts and celebrates the Chinese American culture of today. Fun, danceable songs reinforce new phrases.

The video is accompanied with a support booklet with vocabulary drills and the script in English, Chinese, and pinyin so parents can follow along and get involved in the teaching process. Every Language Tree video embeds our unique Multi-Cognition Approach™, developed by a cognitive scientist from Stanford University, which stresses three proven learning techniques: 1) repetition, 2) deep thinking, and 3) information clustering. The net result is that your child will be able to learn more phrases, more quickly, and better retain what was taught.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Full of errors. Actors speak too fast., May 22, 2004

By	Jeff K. "jeff4314" (Fremont, CA.) - See all my reviews

I suppose the reviewers here know nothing about Chinese, and therefore are unaware of the many glaring and inexcusable errors in the accompanying booklet. The errors are in the TONES of the words. Just a few examples: XI HUAN (LIKE) is written as two FORTH TONES, where it should be one THIRD and one FORTH tone. SHAN (HILL) is written with a SECOND tone, where it should be a FIRST tone. And so on, with many errors. The result is that you simply cannot trust what you are reading to be correct. If you learn a word with the wrong TONE, you are learning a completely different word.

An analogy would be trying to learn to solve math problems with a book where some of the answers are wrong. You would have to check all the answers with an outside source.

Secondly, while the children in the video speak at a decent speed, the adults rattle away much too fast. This is supposed to be a LEARNING experience. Is it too much to ask for the characters to speak slower than normal speed? Sometimes you can't even make out all the words the adults speak. SLOW DOWN! I'M TRYING TO LEARN! Jeeze.

Overall though, I find these children's programs to be useful for learning Chinese even though I'm an adult. But it burns me up that they could be MUCH MUCH better if the maker had better attention to detail and common sense.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning a new language can be easy and fun!, March 23, 2004

By	David Hsiao "hsiaod" (Honolulu, HI USA) - See all my reviews

I watched both the level 1 and level 2 videos with my American-born elementry school nephew and pre-school niece.
The video was appealing to them because it's like a cartoon video. The scenes in the video are very visual and focused, it's directly related to the dialog, so it's very easy for children to understand what the video is teaching.

The music and songs in the video are also great! I love the tunes, they are very catchy. The children learned it really fast, and soon they are singing along.
I also like the fact that the song lyrics are made up of phrases from the teaching material, and repeat itself over and over. This helps the children to learn through repeatition.

My nephew and niece are both attending private after school program to learn Chinese. I saw far more progress after watching the videos for few weeks, than they going to 1-1/2 years of language school. Plus if I watch the video with the kids, I know exactly what was taught in the video, it's much easier for me to start practcing with them. As oppose to going to the language school, which I have no idea what they are teaching, therefore it's hard for me to start a conversation in Chinese with them.
Also the materials from the video are related to things we would normally encounter in real life, so there are many occasions to take the opportunity to practice the vocabularies.

Lastly, the story of all the videos are centered around Billy and BenBoo, the two main characters, and their family, so you'll be familiar with the characters after the first video, and easy to move on to the next. I especially love the adorable dog Ben Boo, he's so playful and brings so much energy!

Thanks Language Tree for making learning so much fun!!! I can't wait to see the next video!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun and Creative, September 2, 2004

By	Cheryl (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

I've been looking for home tools to help my son learn Mandarin. While we have many videos, books and audio tapes, we were pleasantly surprised by Language Tree's Beginner Level 2 video. Most tools are worthwhile, but this one really stands apart in that the learning aspect is much more enjoyable. The pace is excellent, the characters are bright and adorable and by embedding the lessons within a story it is much more interesting to watch. My son also found the booklet to be very useful. At times he would be too caught up in the story and skip the review section. The nice thing is later on he tends to refer back to the booklet frequently or simply tune into the review portions of the video.