Chinese: Mandarin/English:Level 2:VocabuLearn: Music-Enhanced

Rating:
Summary: Production quality not high
Review: Be very wary of Vocabulearn products, especially for non-European languages. In examining Level 2 Chinese, I found that the speaker who read the Chinese words was marginally literate in Mandarin. Often, she would incorrectly interchange two characters that looked very similar but were pronounced very differently. Sometimes, the speaker would read a character correctly, but the accompanying manual would indicate a different, incorrect pronunciation for the character. The speaker was also not able to differentiate "z" from "zh", "c" from "ch", and so on. Sometimes, she would not read some words in the accompanying manual altogether. If you are not already familiar with Chinese, you will almost certainly memorize incorrect words as well as some correct ones if you use this product. I suspect that Vocubulearn hired its native speakers at sweat-shop rates only to produce a sweat-shop product of little use to someone wanting to learn Mandarin. The problem is that there is not a good alternative to Vocabulearn for large-scale acquisition of Chinese vocabulary.

Rating:
Summary: Learning by Listening
Review: This tape series in 3 volumes for Chinese (and a host of other languages from Armenian to Ukranian) is a real benefit for those learning a language. What it does do is provide the Chinese and English for about 1500 words a volume, far more than in any other series. What it shouldn't be asked to do is be the sole way of learning the language; you'll need some other tapes and books first. It also isn't really suitable for use in a car; the words come at you in such volume that it's like drinking from a fire house. That said, this series is so invaluable that I've bought it for about a dozen languages.