Description

The NEW Mandarin Chinese Foundation CourseAn eight-hour, 100% audio method for learning Mandarin Chinese. Join Michel Thomas Method teacher Harold Goodman and native speaker Jingtao Deng and two students in a live lesson and within the first hour you will be able to construct simple phrases. You will learn the language with the students, hearing both their successes and their mistakes to keep you motivated and involved throughout the course. By the end, you will have the confidence to understand and speak Mandarin.I have been using this course after taking an introductory mandarin course and have found it really helpful, if you haven’t tried the Michel Thomas method before it really works well.Here is a quote from AmazonQuote:I’ve just finished this new Michel Thomas Method Mandarin course, which was written and presented by Dr. Harold Goodman. Apparently, Dr. Goodman was the only person ever to be taught personally by Michel Thomas to understand his approach to learning. It really shows that he has mastered Michel’s technique. The style of the course is what many of us have come to expect from Michel Thomas but with some truly unique and individual twists. I also learned to speak French, German, Spanish and Italian with this method (I’m a bit of a language junkie) but I have to say this one stands out for me for several reasons.Firstly, as a native English speaker we are culturally programmed to believe that Mandarin is almost impossible for us to learn because it is a language which employs tones. The author totally dispels this myth in the first few minutes of the course. He takes English words and then lays a tone over the top to illustrate what they are and how they work. I thought this was very clever because I immediately felt more relaxed with the whole idea of learning Chinese after he did this. When he teaches you a new word he then employs an utterly brilliant method to help you remember both the pronunciation of the word and it’s tone. Each word is given a mnemonic and each tone is assigned a hand-movement and a colour as a way of aiding your recall. The hand-movements seem to work on a subconscious level as I found myself making the correct movement automatically when saying the word.The second reason I love the course is the pace. I never felt rushed or that either of the presenters were becoming irritated with the students. On the old courses Michel himself would often get a bit tetchy when one of the students was slow on the uptake. It must be said that both of the students on this course are excellent and get very few things wrong, usually a mispronunciation, which was corrected in a very gentle way. There is plenty of opportunity to practice each new word (and it’s associated tone) before the course moves on. The students ask more questions than on the other courses I’ve listened to. This is beneficial because they were often questions about things I was thinking of myself. I never felt at any point I was being left behind by the instructor. So often in the past, with other language courses, I’ve found that they would tend to go from being very easy to impossibly difficult all of a sudden and I was left with a sense of hopelessness and then I would give up on the language. Here the progression is gentle but steadily increasing. It’s also worth pointing out that a correct model for pronunciation is given by a native speaker. Often the old courses were criticised because Michel didn’t speak with a native accent (except, arguably, for German).The third reason I love this course is the humour of the presenter, I had a few laugh out loud moments with some of the mnemonics he used. Put it this way, I’ll never forget the Mandarin words for `and’ or `really’ which standout to me as hilarious. There are a few other jokes which are esoteric and may be picked up by some sections of the listening public.I’m a teacher of Finance and I recently had a Mandarin speaking student on one of the courses I was presenting. I thought to myself `I wonder if she will understand me if I use some of the Chinese I know’. So I gave it a try. She immediately played back to me what I had said to her in English to show that she understood and commented that my use of the tones was perfect. When she asked how long I’d been learning she refused to believe that it was only a few hours. This was a real boost to my confidence that in such a short period I was communicating relatively complex ideas and being understood by native speakers.Finally, having finished this course I feel a tremendous sense of achievement. I have done something that most English speakers consider to be virtually impossible. I now have a good understanding of the sentence patterns and tones of Mandarin so that when I wish to take my studies further I will be able to do so. However, I’ve decided that I’m going to wait for the Advanced course and Vocabulary course that are promised by the publisher for 2008; I just can’t imagine any other method being as good. I hope many people who read this review will also experience this truly unique learning method for themselves, I highly commend it to you.