Instant Immersion Mandarin ( CS-383S )

Rating:
Summary: Good vocabulary builder
Review: This program doesn't seem to be good for absolute beginners, but it's good for expanding your vocabulary. It took me a while working with other programs for learning Chinese before I was ready to make good use of this one. Dictionary part of it is awesome because you can see how the words are written in Chinese characters as well as in pinyin. It has lots of fun games to test your comprehension and a lot of the material is focused on testing your knowledge of Chinese characters.

The program does teach some dialogues as well as grammar and it is helpful for making sure you're pronouncing the words correctly, but for me the greatest benefit of this program lies in helping one to learn lots of words and characters. You get to learn about 3000 words and 800 characters and the best part about all of these words is that you get to hear them and you get to play with characters through lots of fun games. It really does help to retain the information.