danielk Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5977 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English*, Russian
| Message 1 of 2 28 October 2009 at 10:19pm | IP Logged |
Hi
Having completed the Michel Thomas and Pimsleur Mandarin courses, I'm trying to make a start on Edexcel's new GCSE book (GCSEs being exams in Britain for 16 year olds). I like the book and hope to continue on to the A level books in due course.
Anyone else trying/tried to use secondary school books for self-learning? I anticipate good results, as the book seems lively and quite thorough and I know I'll stick at it through to the end, but the lack of the accompanying audio CD is a pain. I would order it but it's over £100. Perhaps somebody will post it online one day.
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Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6139 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese
| Message 2 of 2 28 October 2009 at 11:04pm | IP Logged |
The books are obviously good if you're focussed on an exam, i.e. there won't be
anything extra, especially at GCSE level. However, there normally designed to be taught
rather than studied, so there may be gaps in explanations, answer keys - or just more
open questions which would be at the teacher's discretion to correct. If there's no
audio for £100 it seems a waste of money - stick to Chinesepod!
Quite a dry way to do it, and what I did with Russian many years ago, is to order the
syllabus and past papers from Edexcel. At GCSE level, there's a core vocab of about
1000 words (included in the syllabus), which if you know and can use well, will get you
around an A grade. If you look through the past papers you'll see odd questions here
and there which go a little beyond this basic word list,which are designed to pick out
A* students.
Then you can just use an Teach Yourself (TY Mandarin goes beyond GCSE level) or another
course designed for self-study and use the past papers to test you progress.
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