Rating: 
Summary: Worthless. Absolutely worthless.
Review: Save your money. The interface is god-awful, buggy as hell, and the program clearly was rushed out for production. Little thought has been put into this program. The games are cheesy, stupid and boring. However, one cool feature was a section with extremely short video segments with the corresponding Japanese (in romaji) scrolling on the left side. I would pay good money for a program that did just that in more extensive amounts. Hope this helps prevent people from wasting their $39.99 on this program. -sev
Rating:
Summary: Worthless junk not even fit for the garbage.
Review: The program "Learn Spanish Now" turned out to be total junk and a complete waste of money. The only lesson I learned was to not to buy computer software without trying it first. Don't waste your money on this senseless mess.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Money and Time!
Review: The worse thing about this is that it doesn't teach grammar...you cannot learn a language without knowing the grammar! This program has long conversation dialogues that are absolutely useless, especially if you don't know the grammar. Oh and the speech practice meter is a joke! If you just blow or humm into the microphone it'll still say you did a good job! I threw this crap out and got a real Chinese tutor which is really the only true way to learn a language.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Product
Review: This product by Transparent Language excels in teaching Polish. I would recomend this program for many reasons.
First of all they use many methods to teach such as games, conversation practices, and reading/speaking in Polish, ect. Secondly, they give you the tools to learn the basics of Polish such as a Grammar tutorial, alphabet reference, word dictation, ect. Another thing about Polish Now that I really appreciated was the vast amount of content(meaning language) that was in the final product. There were practice conversations for many situations and you could hear every Polish word said in the program. Finally, the depth of the program's features are truely amazing. It goes as far as allowing you to compare your pronunciation of words to the pronunciation of a native speaker's words.
Transparent Language did an excellent job with this product and I highly recomend it to anyone looking to learn Polish.
Rating: 
Summary: Best used as addition to other programs
Review: This program uses only pinyin - no Chinese characters - however Transparent Language has a very decent program for leaning Chinese characters called "Power Chinese" and even though that program teaches you only how to read and write simplified characters, the information is presented in a fun way through playing games and puzzles. One of the programs for learning how to write traditional, or rather, long form of characters is Easy Chinese Tutor (also available through amazon.com).
On the good side with Learn Chinese Now, you can click on every word separately to hear it pronounced slowly (and you can also check your own pronounciation by recording it) - when you got the word, you can click to hear an entire sentence at a normal speed or listen to an entire segment.
The program does have pictures, but they are not really related to the material, so don't expect to see people who are involved in a dialogue actually speaking to each other (as if you were watching a movie) - the only thing you'll find here is several slides.
After learning some basic words and expressions, the program leaps to an intermediate / advanced level and if this is the only program you're using, this leap may feel too much - even though yes, you can still click to hear each word separately.
The program contains as a bonus CD - Unitype, which has two programs Global Office and Global Writer. Global Office will expire after about 15 days, and you'll have to actually purchase to continue using it; Global Writer will still be functional and you can use it to write / type Chinese characters - although I personally much prefer NJStar. In order to use these programs to type Chinese characters, you input characters in pinyin, but you still have to know how the character you desire to use looks like in Chinese, since you'll be offered a selection of characters which are all written in the same way in pinyin (without the use of tonal accents).
Rating:
Summary: A very good supplement for the serious student of Chinese
Review: This software is not for the complete beginner. If you are a complete beginner, try Beginner's Chinese by Yong Ho and/or the pricey Ultimate Mandarin Chinese (ISBN 0517708779) instead. The software has 4 'chapters,' two being in the 'beginner' level and the other two being in the 'intermediate' level. The chapters consist of dialogues that are rendered in Pinyin only (NO Chinese characters are used). You can listen to the dialogue and follow along with the Pinyin; you can also click on the Pinyin and the program will display the definition of the word/character. Except for one chapter which contains Chinese survival phrases, all the other chapters are better suited for a college student of Chinese than it is for the person who is doing self-study or one who is a complete beginner. The dialogues are in fact very interesting because they explore various aspects of Chinese culture, but one would have to have one semester of college Chinese before being able to appreciate it; after 2 semesters of college Chinese, one could probably understand 40-50% of the dialogue without looking at the translation; after 4 semesters (that is, two years of college Chinese), one could understand most of the simpler dialogues, but the software is still a very good tool for developing listening skills. Overall, if you are a complete beginner, skip this software; if you are taking college/high school Chinese, and you plan to stick with it either by taking more classes or doing serious self-study, then this software is definitely valuable as a supplement; and I would highly recommend it.
P.S. The grammar section and the Pinyin guide is so basic and lacking in substance that it is basically worthless.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Spanish Tutor!
Review: While it doesn't have the photos or pictures as some other programs do, the process of learning the language and the interface are the best! The speach recognition is better than Rosetta Stone. And that is saying a lot because Rosetta Stone is another great program. The age on the package reads 12 to adult but my 9yo loves it. Some kids don't require pictures or "fuff" to learn. I'm looking forward to buying other languages from this company! You can actually participate in conversions. I do have to say, though, it does take a little time to figure out where to start in the program. BUT you must read the help section! It really... helps. :) Once you understand how to work the program... it's great!
Rating:
Summary: Advance Level
Review: Wow, this package is really hard. If you are a beginner, stay away. This package is a lot harder than Ultimate Mandarin. I consider myself intermediate, but this package blew me away. Anyway, other package like Rosetta stone chinese is pretty .... VocabuLearn is also a lot .... This package has tons of vocabulary which is much better than VocabuLearn Chinese. This package is much better than in a chinese classroom because you can listen one word by one word for pronunciation. Anyway, ChineseNow is very similar to a classroom experience, except that their vocabularies and sentences are very very difficult. If transparentlanguage company uses easy vocabularies with the same effort, I think they will be much more successful. Why? Because in ChineseNow, they worked very hard and put a lot of effort in producing this CD, but I just think that they are targetting the wrong audience. For me, after one year of Conversation Mandarin, I am starting on Ultimate Mandarin which this will cost me another year. Then, I will attack this ChineseNow CD again. This ChineseNow is one serious material, just too hard...
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