Ultimate Chinese (Mandarin) Beginner-Intermediate (CD/Book) (LL(R) Ultimate Basic-Intermed) | 
|  | | | Title: | Ultimate Chinese (Mandarin) Beginner-Intermediate (CD/Book) (LL(R) Ultimate Basic-Intermed) | | Author: | Living Language | | Publisher: | Living Language | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 24 August, 2004 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1400021030 / 9781400021031 | | List Price: | $79.95 | | You Save: | $29.58 | | Amazon Price: | $50.37 | |
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Product Description
Ultimate Mandarin Chinese has everything you need to learn Chinese from scratch or to revive the Chinese that you learned years ago. This course combines conversation and culture in an easy-to-follow, enjoyable, and effective format. It's the perfect way to learn Chinese for school, travel, work, or personal enrichment.
Ultimate Chinese Beginner-Intermediate includes:
•40 lessons in a comprehensive 416-page textbook:
Each lesson contains a lively and authentic dialogue, vocabulary, grammar and usage, step-by-step character writing, cultural highlights, and plenty of practice. The first ten lessons also include special pronunciation sections that will have you speaking right from the beginning. The book also contains review sections, readings, supplemental vocabulary sections, appendixes on essential Chinese grammar, and a Chinese-English/English-Chinese glossary.
•8 hours of recordings with an ingenious two-step approach:
Learn at home: Listen to the first set of recordings as you follow along in your textbook. Immerse yourself in Chinese while you listen and repeat with the all-Chinese recordings, and learn conversation, grammar, vocabulary, and more
Learn on the go: Then practice, review, and expand upon what you’ve learned with the second set of recordings. An instructor will guide you through each lesson, and since no reading is required, you can listen in the car, on the train, at the gym…anywhere!
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Customer Reviews:
• Not For The Beginner 01 March, 2008
For me, this package isn't well constructed.
Lets take lesson 1 for instance, the very first dialogue we are given is:
Wang xiaojie, hao jiu bu jian! Ni hao!
It then gives the whole conversation before giving the translation in English:
Miss Wang, I haven't seen you in a long time. Hello!
Ok, so how are we supposed to know what word means what when you consider that Mandarin word order is mostly not the same as English?
It then gives 32 words showing how different tones have different meanings. In the first lesson! Are we supposed to remember this?
The audio is very fast and confusing to use - you need to be pretty good with the FFWD and REW
- Reviewed by customer ID: A19TZI79I2UJ0I
• First Time Learner 10 April, 2008
I purchased this package, because I am interested in learning Madarin. I am fluent in Spanish, and have taken some other language courses. For the beginner this course is not extremely helpful. The course material is set up as a review, and not really for the first time learner.
The CD's are helpful, but the native speakers do not pause enough for you to really practice repeating the dialogue. There are two sets of CD's the home study set and the travel set. The home study set is pure Mandarin with no translations. The travel set has translations. Both sets are basically the same material, but the travel set is harder to work with. They modify the lesssons on the travel cd, and you can't really understand the modifications, because they deviated from the course material in the text.
If you are looking for a review package, I would say this might be helpful, but for the first time Mandarin student, don't expect too much from this package. You can get some great verbal pronunciation practice, because the native speakers provide you with many hours of Mandarin dialogue. But the course material is sort of like a first semester language class, minus the grammar rules. You'll start with phrases and dialoge right off. The vocabulary is very limited, but if you can pick up a good Mandarin course book, these language CD's would be a great supplement for a home study course.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AH15SYIJAJM0F
• Book And Cd's Probably Too Advanced For Some Students Of Mandarin 16 June, 2008
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!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1EHB8N44GA027
• 10 X Better Than Last Version 25 September, 2007
For students who tried the first version of LL Mandarin, this latest is far superior (both to the original LL and competitors).
First, it now had grammar fully integrated into the course. So, as you proceed thru the course, you get a clear understanding of basic Chinese grammatical constructs.
Second, it now has a separate set of CD's that are designed for book-free learning - i.e. listen while you drive. It would be helpful if the publisher included the text for this section, but it is fairly easy to follow without one.
Worth the money - better than anything else I've seen on the market...
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2N51LJDIK2DIX
• Stimulating And Fun Way To Review Conversational Chinese 08 October, 2007
This package of Text Book and CDs for use at home and in car, bus, train, jet, boat - wherever you can play CDs - is clean, fun and efficient. You'll get warmed up on conversational topics painlessly and effectively.
Not a great way to get Character review, but a good package for speaking fluently and idiomatically.
- Reviewed by customer ID: ACJXSBCARZPMX
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