Product Description

Power Chinese was designed to meet the specific learning needs of native English speakers. You can spend as little as 30 minutes a day and in just eight weeks you will have covered the equivalent of one year of college-level Chinese. Using an innovative learning strategy which breaks down and then reconstructs the Chinese language, Power Chinese will have you reading, writing, and using essential Chinese in no time. Power Chinese begins by tackling the most difficult aspects of Chinese for the typical English learner, including pronunciation, tones, and key aspects of syntax and grammar. But don't worry! Challenging Concepts Made Easy These and all other concepts introduced in Power Chinese are presented as comparisons to how things are done in English--allowing you to focus on those areas that are most different from English and making learning Chinese easier and more enjoyable. Power Chinese is based on the same award-winning method that earned Power Japanese dozens of stellar reviews and awards. The Power Method--uniquely suited to meet the needs of busy learners--includes: * Memory techniques that make information more digestible and more retainable to adult learners * A less intimidating approach that leaves out information that is not absolutely relevant to understanding the language * Extensive use of graphics to heighten right-brain participatory learning

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3780 in Software
• Brand: Transparent Language
• Released on: 2004-03-29
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Features

• Fully animated stroke-by-stroke writing of the 600 most-common simplified Chinese characters.
• More than 800 phrases and 1,200 sentences chosen for their high frequency in everyday speech. See these words and phrases over and over in sentences, in dialogs, and in video clips.
• Over 2,500 audio clips of words, phrases, and sentences all spoken by native speakers.
• Extensive interactive drills to help you retain what you have learned.
• Humorous dialogs to further promote retention of key phrases and concepts. Video clips of impromptu interviews with real people speaking Chinese in real-life situations.

From the Manufacturer
Power Chinese was designed to meet the specific learning needs of native English speakers. You can spend as little as 30 minutes a day and in just eight weeks you will have covered the equivalent of one year of college-level Chinese.

Using an innovative learning strategy which breaks down and then reconstructs the Chinese language, Power Chinese will have you reading, writing, and using essential Chinese in no time.

Power Chinese begins by tackling the most difficult aspects of Chinese for the typical English learner, including pronunciation, tones, and key aspects of syntax and grammar. But don't worry!

Challenging Concepts Made Easy

These and all other concepts introduced in Power Chinese are presented as comparisons to how things are done in English--allowing you to focus on those areas that are most different from English and making learning Chinese easier and more enjoyable.

Power Chinese is based on the same award-winning method that earned Power Japanese dozens of stellar reviews and awards. The Power Method--uniquely suited to meet the needs of busy learners--includes:

• Memory techniques that make information more digestible and more retainable to adult learners
• A less intimidating approach that leaves out information that is not absolutely relevant to understanding the language
• Extensive use of graphics to heighten right-brain participatory learning

Power Chinese includes:

• Fully animated stroke-by-stroke writing of the 600 most-common simplified Chinese characters.
• More than 800 phrases and 1,200 sentences chosen for their high frequency in everyday speech. See these words and phrases over and over in sentences, in dialogs, and in video clips.
• Over 2,500 audio clips of words, phrases, and sentences all spoken by native speakers.
• Extensive interactive drills to help you retain what you have learned.
• Humorous dialogs to further promote retention of key phrases and concepts.
• Video clips of impromptu interviews with real people speaking Chinese in real-life situations.

Discover for yourself why Power Chinese is unique and unequalled among Chinese-learning systems.

Customer Reviews

Good Course But You Need to Know This .....
Power Chinese is good, but you need to know that with it you will not be able to create your own original sentence in Mandarin. For this reason I suggest you take Amazon's recommendation of 'Better Together' and order this along with Behind the Wheel Chinese (Mandarin), Level 1: Learn to Speak Mandarin Chinese Quickly and Easily! (8 One Hour CDs). If you can only order one at a time then begin with Behind the Wheel Chinese (Mandarin), Level 1: Learn to Speak Mandarin Chinese Quickly and Easily! (8 One Hour CDs) and then move on to Power Chinese.

A DVD introduction to basic manderin chinese.
Power Chinese is relatively inexpensive introduction to the chinese language.If you devote enough time to study you will learn the same language skills that more expensive DVDs may teach you.

An Enjoyable Companion to Pimsleur
First off, with respect to the compatibility issues, a quick stop at www.transparent.com shows that the program must run at 1024x768 or at 800x600. This is unfortunate, and it is annoying to have to change my monitor's resolution, but it seems a small price for an interesting and useful program.



Pimsleur is a great tool for learning the spoken language and the pronunciation. Where it falls down is the lack of additional resources if you're not sure what you're hearing. This program provides those resources in spades. You get to see the actual Chinese characters, as well as their pinyin equivalents. This makes it much easier to validate your ears. The ability to see the stroke order for characters adds to the value of the program.



The examples and exercises are excellent. The discussion of the progression of the Chinese characters for king, jade, and country (whether true or not) truly helps to "cement" those characters in your mind. The exercise where you see the character, play its sound, then position it under the correct table heading--depending on which of the four tones you hear--is extremely valuable. The same can be said for the exercises in which you must select which consonant you are hearing. This ear training, combined with the visual link to the characters and the pinyin, adds a great deal of clarity to the learning process.



Since I'm already using the Pimsleur CD's, I cannot say whether or not Power Chinese is adequate to stand on its own as a Chinese language learning tool. I can definitely say that it augments Pimsleur quite nicely.