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Eric’s Mandarin Log (see post 1 for course list) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6176 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 81 of 141 12 June 2011 at 7:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Since I'm close to the last lesson of Chinese With Ease, I thought I'd comment on the quality of the course. I'm not going to actually speak of the quality of the lessons and the recordings, which are both good. The dialogs are sometimes funny as expected, the actors are good, and usually the vocabulary is helpful, everyday language.
The problem I have found is that the second volume is riddled with errors. It was somewhat surprising because I don't remember the first volume being so bad. Specifically: 1) Tons of tone errors. I mean literally dozens and dozens. Also, can someone confirm or refute the following claim in Assimil that first appeared in lesson 102 (!). "Before a fourth tone syllable and before the classifier ge, qi1 (seven) and ba1 (eight) take a second tone." I've never heard of this before. If it's true, I have no idea why they waited so long to mention it. 2) Audio not matching the text. Sometimes, it was simply prices not matching (one kuai vs. two kuai). In one or two cases, there were whole sentences in the audio that didn't appear in the text. The biggest one though was an entire lesson not matching at all (lesson 79). I bought the audio from someone who bought the French version of the program so maybe that's the source of the differences. But I've never heard of the same generation Assimil audio differing across L1s. 3) Some translations where pretty bad or missing. Battery was translated as accumulator. I guess that's from French. There were some words that were never included in the dialogs or in the glossary in the back of the book that showed up in the exercises. Also, there was at least one dialog where part of the literal translation wasn't included at all. 4) The voices weren't consistent in the dialogs. For example, in lesson 44 the actors switched characters midway through the dialog. 5) Continuity problems/formatting problems. Some lessons that seemed to have several dialogs were not labelled/formatted as such. It wasn't always clear if the problem was the lack of formatting or a poorly written lesson that was actually supposed to be one dialog. All in all, still a very good course but obvously there was some shoddy work that I hadn't expected. It wouldn't have made me skip the course if I had known, but it did make the learning experience more fustrating at times than it had to be. Edited by newyorkeric on 12 June 2011 at 4:12pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6176 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 82 of 141 14 June 2011 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I've finished lesson 105 of Chinese With Ease! I bought the first volume in November 2007 though I think I started doing it seriously around early 2010. So about 18 months plus. I'm ready to call it a day. I still need to do some revising, but then it's time to move onto something new.
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| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6176 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 83 of 141 27 June 2011 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I've received the old Colloquial Chinese in the mail and have started in on it. From first glance, it seems the style is like a blend of Assimil and DeFrancis's books. The dialogs in the early chapters are presented with one line in Mandarin then the translation in English. In later chapters it's side by side, like Assimil, as the dialogs get longer. After the dialogs there is a grammar section and exercises called Speech Patterns that are similar to the building up exercises in DeFrancis's books.
I also really like the voices in the audio from Columbia University. The Assimil voices and their acting were starting to grate on me. Edited by newyorkeric on 28 June 2011 at 5:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emptysilo3 Newbie United States Joined 4871 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes | Message 84 of 141 27 June 2011 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
If you still have Beginning Chinese by Defrancis, look at the notes to lesson 4 note number 12 (bottom of page 45). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6176 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 85 of 141 29 June 2011 at 4:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, I checked it out. Which DeFrancis texts have you used?
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| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6176 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 86 of 141 08 July 2011 at 6:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I plan to finish this revision of Assimil within the next two to three weeks and then will put it aside to take up Colloquial Chinese full time. I've skimmed the first 5 lessons of CC so far. There hasn't been any new vocabulary yet except for a word here and there but that will change in the next couple of lessons.
I'll be traveling the next couple of weeks. I'm visiting the US for the first time in several years then heading to Montreal before hightailing back to Singapore. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5764 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 88 of 141 08 July 2011 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Where will you be in the US? Are you originally from the New York area? (just a guess from your username!) That's a long trip - the jet lag would knock me out for days! Hope you have a pleasant visit!
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