Customer Reviews
Excellent - you'll be surprised how easy it is! - By: J. Baldwin, 07 Jan 2009 
I have a few Chinese friends & have always thought it would be polite to try to learn a little of their language. But I've tried a few courses with little success - the difference between the written & spoken language is immense (in fact my Chinese friend says she finds it difficult too!)
This course focuses on speaking. I've done other Michel Thomas courses & was delighted to discover this new Chinese programme but intrigued as well as to how the technique would transfer.
It works really well - by the end of the first CD I was able to say a few basic sentences & by the end of the second I could construct a few complex phrases. The technique works on the basis that with a little vocabulary & an understanding of basic grammar, you can make yourself understood. Confidence breeds confidence.
There were times doing this course that I couldn't stop laughing because I was able to construct sentences & actually speak Chinese.
I tried it out on my friend & although I spoke slowly, she understood me (bearin mind, as they sayin the course, that Beijing Mandarin is not quite the same as Shanghai Mandarin etc, & the key to being understood is the tones, not the pronunciation) In fact she was very impressed & told me that if I tried it outin China, not only would people be honoured that I'd given it a go, I'd also impress the ladies ;-)
I highly recommend this product. I've done French, Spanish, German & Italian & now Chinese. Dutch, Russian & Arabic next!
Very enjoyable, but useful? - By: Linovel, 09 Sep 2008 
For oncein my life I've actually completed a language course. And very enjoyable it was, too. I actually looked forward to doing it. It was rarely a chore. And I think I must've retained 70% of what I was taught. However, it was only on the last CD that I realised that the majority of it was utterly useless. I mean, okay, if you want to say, "He has a television under his table," it's quite brilliant. Or "Do you have a good teacherin your school?" Again, essential. But if you want survival language to get you around China, alas, it's a major disappointment. Pity that.
Buy the foundation course! - By: Mr. D. Le Dosquet-Bergquist, 30 Aug 2008 
OK so I bought the introductory taster course. It really works, i enjoyed it, i feel confident using the tones.. perfect. Only problem is that it is too short, so now I am buying the full foundation course - of which I have already done the first 2 hours. Go straight for the foundation course - it is a leap of faith to some extent, but it will save you a bit of money & more waiting around for the postman.
Great stuff!
Amazing Course that gives you the ability to sound Chinese! - By: P. M. Carson, 25 Jun 2008 First of all, I'm a Michel Thomas fan. From seeing his documentaryin 1997 'The Language Master' I knew he had stumbled on/discovered an intuitive way to learn languages.
I bought his French coursein 2001 with excitement - & thoroughly enjoyed it.
As impressed as I was; it always bugged me 'How about an exotic language, like Arabic or Chinese? That would prove this method to work'. Years passed. Michel Thomas died. I thought that was it.
2 years ago, I made friends with some Chinese people & I always said to them that I'd learn mandarin. I never did! I knew from my language learning experience that any course I bought would be a hard slog - unless it was MT.
So it was with great excitement I discovered this coursein March this year. I immediately went to my friends & asked 'How long would it take me to learn Mandarin to a basic conversational level?'. They replied, 3-4 hours study a day, for six months.
I replied 'See youin one month'. Such was my confidencein the method that before I'd even ordered it, I knew it would make me proficient as it had done for French & Spanish.
I listened to the course entirelyin the car, with my hand signals for tones (and managed to avoid crashing twice!) & after 2 weeks I'd done the Foundation, & then moved onto the Advanced.
During this time I was amazed at how a language so alien was goingin & sticking.
Just before I met my friends, I bumped into another Chinese friend of mine & I started addressing herin Chinese. At first, she thought I knew the odd word, but as the conversation continued she began to realise I could speak well. At one point she asked why I'd learned Chinese? I replied 'because I have Chinese friends & I want to speak to them'in Mandarin - she was gobsmacked!
When my friends came round, they too were amazed & very encouraging. One even remarked that I had a 'Beijing' accent. After 1 month? LOL.
What else can I say about this course? Only, if you're planning to learn Mandarin, this has to be your starting point.
Harold Goodman has done an amazing job of making something so alien to us Westerners come so easily - it is evident he put a huge amount of preparation into it, & has used the Michel Thomas method extremely well.
Buy it!
Good for tones - By: IDM, 11 Apr 2008 Having been a big fan of Michel Thomas' previous courses, I was keen to see how his method would work with Chinese, which is a very different language to the European languages he had approached himself. For me the answer was a little mixed.
The best aspect of the course, as highlightedin other reviews, is the treatment of the tones, which is the most useful I have come accross, & it is really on the basis of this that I would recommend the course. Whereas most courses simply repeat the tonesin order & rely on the listener to pick up the differences, the Michel Thomas method is excellent herein allowing you to listen to the students making the same mistakes as you would & hearing these mistakes addressed.
The other big advantage of this course over the original courses is that there is now a native speaker, meaning that the accent is a lot more reliable than had previously been the case.
However, I did also have a few problems with the course:
The first is, contrary to some other reviewers, I found the mnemonics, although sometimes good, were often bad. One of the potentially difficult aspects of Chinese is that a lot of the words can sound quite similar, with sounds that do not often appearin English. Harold Goodman seemed often to fall back on quite tenuous methods (e.g. "Mr. Dui was always correct" for Dui=Correct, or "Mrs Xia kept hiding under the table" for Xia=Under) with the result that a lot of the CD seems to be taken up with students not quite remembering the right word. Earworms & the book "Learning Chinese Characters" both cope with this a lot better.
Secondly, I felt that while Chinese grammar is often much simpler than English (for example the verbs don't change form) Harold Goodman's explanations sometimes seemed to make it more complicated than it needed to be. For examplein a Chinese question, the word orderin a question is exactly the same as it would bein the corresponding statement, but the students seemed to be allowed to go through a number of wrong assumptions (e.g. that the question word went at the end of the sentence) before coming to this conclusion. Sometimes the explanations came across as more of a series of exemptions to rules rather than the logical rules that they are. It gets therein the end, but for me it lacked some of the clarity which made the other Michel Thomas courses so good.
Thirdly, as with all the coursesin the series, you will need another course as well to teach the more useful, everyday things you will need to say.
Finally, while Michel Thomas always argued that the aim of speaking a language should be to get the ball over the net (i.e. to be understood), I think it is important to know when you are being taught something that isn't quite rightin order to keep things simple so that you can be understood. The course uses only one measure word ("ge") throughout; while this may make more sensein a course of this length than trying to learn the separate measure words, I think it would be helpful to point out that this is not quite correct.
To conclude, I have given this course 4 stars because it is so good on the tones, & useful, if occasionally frustrating elsewhere. However, I felt that it lacked some of the clarity of the old courses, &in the absence of some of the verb forms of the European languages, it didn't seem to have quite the same strong sense of purpose. After completing the German foundation course, I really felt that I had a lot more confidence to say things that I had not thought I would be able to say from such a short course & without puttingin a lot of work. After doing this course, I felt quite comfortable describing where a television wasin relation to a table (provided the options were limited to above or below), but still would not feel comfortable with anything more complex. It is different enough to be a useful addition for anyone trying to learn Chinese, but for me not quite as good as the originals.
