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Rating: 
Summary: A Teacher In China
Review: I'm an American ESL teacher working in China. I bought this book and 4 casettes because I needed to learn some Chinese as quickly as possible. This set was originally published by Advance Memory Research some years ago. That may explain why some of the material is out of date for rapidly changing China.The recordings use an interesting feature called Split
Sound in which the Chinese words are heard on the right speaker and the English translation in the left speaker. The 17 dialogs are read sentence by sentence in Chinese with translations into English. The whole dialog is then broken down into words and phrases. Many additional words are included in this phase of each unit. The words and phrases are spoken clearly and are easy to follow. This is of vital importance because Chinese is a tonal language in which meaning is determined by the tone used in pronouncing the word. The book that comes with the course contains all of the recorded material as well as brief grammar explanations and some useful information about Chinese culture. Unfortunately, reading and writing are not taught. All of the translations in the book are in pinyin. Another negative is that the dialogs aren't very interesting. Chinese is a difficult language to learn. I completed both the basic and the intermediate courses. What I learned was practical and sufficient for my every day needs. I would recommend this inexpensive course to anyone who wants to learn Mandarin Chinese.
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