China Panorama

[Meng Lelan]

Has anyone here on this forum reviewed China Panorama? I'm interested in hearing comments particularly the beginning and intermediate levels and on the quality of the VCDs thanks.

[Luobot]

See this comment -- not encouraging. Perhaps others can add to that.

[character]

I haven't used the series, but I did try the pinyin ("Chinese Phonetics") and character writing VCDs. The pinyin VCD and book was pretty good, with animations of tongue movement, etc. The character writing VCDs were not worth the money.

[OneEye]

I have the Approaching Chinese course. It's decent. I used to use it, but with some modifications that make it a pretty damn good program.

I added the vocab to an SRS flashcard program. I also chopped short pieces of dialogue from the MP3 CD to loop over and over for chorusing and accent reduction. I may have done some other stuff but those were the big changes.

But, I've seen some of the Intermediate videos. I won't be buying those. Maybe the Tourism series just for personal interest.

[thomast]

I like this book if you plan on using it with a tutor rather than through self-study with the video/audio. The pace is good and it's friendly and more accessible than other texts I've used (Integrated Chinese, for example). It's pretty well organized too with a good amount of repetition. Plus I like the way it revisits certain vocabulary and sentence structures, building on those concepts and reinforcing them in your memory. Here's a review of China Panorama from another student using the book.