TRENDY Diglot Newbie Spain Joined 5106 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Mandarin
| Message 73 of 141 07 June 2011 at 12:07pm | IP Logged |
newyorkeric, i`ve seen that you got the Modern Mandarin Chinese grammar, i am considering buying it since i read some rave reviews about it.
What do you make of it?
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newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6323 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| Message 74 of 141 07 June 2011 at 12:19pm | IP Logged |
I haven't used it yet, Trendy, so I don't know. I bought it because I liked the Italian version of the book.
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Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin
| Message 75 of 141 07 June 2011 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
newyorkeric wrote:
For the first half of level 1, there are about four and half minutes of dialog audio. |
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If you are interested, I can give you the number of dialog/summary minutes in levels 3-6 as well as the number of individual dialogs/summaries. It will probably be several months before I buy level 7.
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newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6323 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| Message 76 of 141 07 June 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
Thanks, that would be helpful.
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Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin
| Message 77 of 141 08 June 2011 at 3:46am | IP Logged |
These are the regular dialogs/summaries minutes for CLO for levels 3 to 6. The extra audio material is not presented in these numbers.
CLO Repeat/Slow Regular Speed # Dialogs/
Level Minutes Minutes   ; ; Summaries
3 53.3 19.5 &n bsp; 39
4 41.1 19.1 &n bsp; 25
5 33 &nbs p;22.4 &n bsp; 22
6 59.4 38.5 &n bsp; 30
Interestingly enough, the audios have no beginning/end music nor announcement that it's CLO. I'm used to PopUpChinese and ChinesePod dialog only audios identifying the material as theirs.
I can't seem to get rid of the extra characters...hopefully it's still readable.
Edited by Snowflake on 09 June 2011 at 5:18pm
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newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6323 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| Message 78 of 141 09 June 2011 at 5:26am | IP Logged |
Thanks, Snowflake. The dialog audio really ramps up in level 6. For levels 1 through 6 there is about 110 minutes of audio, based on 10 minutes of audio in level 1, which I am still editing. That's not bad.
Do they use the same two native speakers throughout?
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newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6323 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| Message 79 of 141 09 June 2011 at 7:38am | IP Logged |
I'm completely stoked because I found a resource that may possess extreme awesomeness...
As I've written above, I've been rooting around for a book to follow up on Assimil. I ruled out TY Chinese quickly and thought the Colloquial Chinese by Qian was good enough, but I was really that excited by it. It's kinda typical of the current courses out there. A lot of silly exercises and audio with a lot of English in it. I have read that the old Colloquial Chinese course by Ping-cheng T'ung and David E. Pollard is pretty nice. You can see a preview here:
Colloquial Chinese by Ping-cheng T'ung and David E. Pollard
It looks like it has a similar Assimil dual text approach, and the format looks quite nice, something that I really value. There also seems to be a lot more listening drills than Assimil and a more structured grammar approach. Plus, it's supposed to be pretty funny to boot. Seems like a great book. You can even get copies for a reasonable price.
The only problem as usual for these old books is the audio. Amazon sells a cassette for about $30, but I wasn't sure how I was going to digitalize it. I bought the text anyway figuring I would still get some use out of it.
The lack of audio was still bugging me though so after some googling to see whether it was available somewhere, I found this page from Columbia University:
Columbia University.
The audio for the book?! But I don't think it is. I think Columbia recorded the dialogs and exercises from the books themselves because there is over 5 hours of audio, all in Chinese! The quality is also really good.
To summarize: There is a relatively cheap looking book out there *with audio* that may be a very nice follow up or substitute to Assimil. We shall see...
Edited by newyorkeric on 09 June 2011 at 9:33am
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Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin
| Message 80 of 141 09 June 2011 at 5:18pm | IP Logged |
newyorkeric wrote:
Thanks, Snowflake. The dialog audio really ramps up in level 6. For levels 1 through 6 there is about 110 minutes of audio, based on 10 minutes of audio in level 1, which I am still editing. That's not bad. |
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Yup. Even though there is not a 1:1 ratio of separate audios to lessons, I've been pretty happy with the amount of audio, vocabulary and material covered. There's been enough times where the material included things which I thought wouldn't be needed anytime soon and then overheard those terms used in conversation.
newyorkeric wrote:
Do they use the same two native speakers throughout? |
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The regular speed separate audios mostly feature Kirin and Raphael. There are a few other native speaker voices used here and there. The slow/repeat material so far has only Kirin's voice.
Some other things...as the levels progress the silent gaps in the repeat/slow material give way to very brief pauses. And summaries are introduced which have more complex sentences. The summaries are like mini lectures. I like having the dialogs with more casual language and the separate summaries.
Edited by Snowflake on 10 June 2011 at 4:37pm
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