Glossika method

[Auberon]

 

I think that for people out of Taiwan, the mainland version would be more useful, I can't bring myself to say the Taiwanese version of 和.

I think there would be a market for having packages with accents e.g. Beijing accent.

 

I always got the impression that the Mandarin spoken in the South of China was closer to the Taiwanese Mandarin than to Beijing.

 

Out of interest, could there be said to be a Mandarin equivalent of Received Pronunciation in English -- i.e. educated-sounding, geographically neutral and clearly comprehensible to speakers across the country? And, if not, do northerners have more trouble understanding southerners than vice versa? Would you draw blank faces saying han4 in Beijing, or merely generate amusement (the way, for example, a broad west-country accent can be sneered at in other parts of Britain)?

[gato]

That would be the accent used on mainland TV shows and movies.

[Crush]

Part of me feels that they should offer a discount to the early adopters who purchased the initial Mandarin/English package, which uses a native Taiwanese speaker, etc. Does anyone feel the same?

I think a discount for those who bought the first course would be nice, too. A lot of us would probably have opted for the mainland version had it been available (or had we known one would be available later).

[hedwards]

@Crush, I don't think they can afford to do that. From what I read earlier, in this thread, it sounds like they don't make much on each product after you factor in the costs involved. I'm guessing that they aren't selling a huge number of copies.

[Crush]

Well if they offered a decent discount to people who bought the course before the new course came out, i would definitely pick the mainland course up, too. If it's the same price as the course with the Taiwanese speaker ($70), i'll just stick with the course i've already got. I of course won't complain if they don't offer a discount, but i think in the end it'd make them more money anyway.

[ChTTay]

The "mainland course" is still at 80% so hard to say when it will come out... Ideally... In one hour ;-)

[crt32]

Well yesterday it was at 97%, not sure what happened there

[etm001]

 

 

Well if they offered a decent discount to people who bought the course before the new course came out, i would definitely pick the mainland course up, too. If it's the same price as the course with the Taiwanese speaker ($70), i'll just stick with the course i've already got. I of course won't complain if they don't offer a discount, but i think in the end it'd make them more money anyway.

I feel the same way. I don't need the mainland version but I wouldn't mind having it to compare to the Taiwanese version. Since both versions are largely duplicative (obviously the pronunciation will differ, as well as some words/phrases/grammar), $70 would be a bit too much to pay. Offering a discount to the early purchasers would be a smart customer relations move IMHO, and I do think that they would have higher total revenue by doing so (higher revenue from the early purchasers, that is).

 

On a related note, the Taiwanese version of the package contains small mistakes throughout the material. It would be nice if early purchasers could download corrected versions of the material. (Honestly the mistakes are minor and I can live with them, but it would be nice to have the corrected version).

[Snuggles]

I really don't think there should be a discount as much as there should be a free copy. For those of us that jumped at the Taiwan version and supported the company, for something that wasn't even what we really wanted, I think that would be fair. Once I have a mainland version the Taiwan one is useless to me. I jumped on he bandwagon before the website was clear and didn't know a mainland version would be coming. Having to pay again would be ridiculous. If it were a dollar or two for downloading that would be ok. But I feel even at half off the price, I wouldn't feel good about paying again.

[hedwards]

@Crush, you obviously haven't ever run a business. Regardless of what the marginal value of buying the new mainland version would be, that doesn't do anything for their costs and by connection their bottom line. They could sell millions of copies for $1 and wind up insolvent because they can't pay the costs of hosting the files. Or in other words, business isn't about selling the most copies, you can sell a ton of copies if you charge a tiny amount of money for them, but if you do that you're likely to go out of business.

 

I'm not sure what there costs are exactly, but they've already stated that if they aren't making that much money on individual copies due to bandwidth costs. And they already offer free updates for the materials you buy. There's also the issue of them using some of the dollars we gave them for a copy in order to expand into other languages. Considering that they're covering languages and dialects that are often hard to find materials for, I think that it's a good use of my money.

[etm001]

 

 

Once I have a mainland version the Taiwan one is useless to me.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't say the Taiwanese version is useless once the mainland version is available. I would love to mix the audio from both packages during review - a nice way to acclimatize myself to an unfamiliar accent, word selections, tone differences, etc. (again, even with these differences the packages should be largely identical). This would be helpful when traveling to different regions within mainland China or to Taiwan (as someone noted earlier, the accents in southern China will be closer to what you hear in the Taiwanese package), or if you want to watch/listen to media that does not have a "standard" mainland accent (and yes these means Taiwan - you're seriously missing out if you ignore Taiwanese-produced TV/movies/music). That said, if you think you'll only ever hear people speaking with a "standard" mainland accent, then sure, don't waste time familiarizing yourself with any others.

 

To put it differently: if I had a friend learning American English, I would recommend that they spend some time listening/watching media produced in the UK/Ireland, Australia/New Zealand, Canada, etc. I'm not saying they need to study the nuances of each dialect, but if they had learning materials from those countries, I would absolutely encourage their use, so as to expand the learner's overall English background, and to prepare them (if even only to a small extent) for when they meet/work with people from those countries, or watch/listen to media produced in those countries. 

 

YMMV.

[querido]

The above post is smart; all of my Mandarin study materials were perfectly spoken and that was a bad mistake.

[Snuggles]

But would you pay 70 dollars? I have access to plenty of TV from Taiwan. Also, I live in China. I hear quite a range of accents each day. Plenty of people hear speak quite differently from the standard.

[JustinJJ]

I agree. For listening it's easy to get exposure to various accents. For imitation of an accent, just learning the standard you want to speak should be sufficient (unless you specifically want to be able to speak in various accents).

[Snuggles]

I don't remember when purchasing it if the website even specified that it was a taiwanese accent and vocabulary. It might have but I don't remember. I do remember it saying Mandarin but that's it. (Anybody remember the old website?)

If it didn't, that would be another reason that many people here should not have to pay again.

[Crush]

@hedwards: no, i've never run a business, but it's hard for me to imagine that it could cost them $40 for every download. If it's going to be sold at $70, i won't buy it. If there's a discount to those of us who bought it early on (say $30-40), then i would pick it up. I don't think people who buy the course with the speaker from Taiwan now should be offered the discount, but it'd be nice for those of us who bought it earlier not knowing that there would be a mainland version later on. I was actually under the impression through the posts here and my conversations with Mike that this version would be the only version released, that it wasn't intended to be specific to Taiwan or anywhere else. If it costs more than $30 per download, then ok, but i can't imagine that's the case and it'd be an extra $30-40 that they wouldn't otherwise have (and just a nice thing to do for those of us who took the risk early on). [EDIT: In short, i don't think offering those of us who purchased the old course a discount would lose them any money]

 

And as others have said, there are quite a few errors in the PDF, including errors in the pinyin, either with wrong tones or using a different character/word. Just recently i came across 他的车一直很脏, where 脏 was transcribed as zang4. I'm not sure if that's the exact sentence since you can't search the PDF (another big fault with the program in my opinion). At first i passed on the mistakes i saw to Mike, but he just said that he already knew about them and they'd been fixed months ago and it seemed like i was bothering more than helping, so i stopped. I don't know where i can download a new "fixed" version of the old pdfs. There's also a bit of ambiguity in the pronunciation of the recordings. for example, 坐在桌子上 sounding like zuo4 zai4 zuo1zi shang, 从事什么工作 sounds like chong2shi4 shen2me gong1zuo4, 她作在地板上 sounding like ta1 zhuo4 zai4 di4ban3shang, etc.

 

@Snuggles: i think it still doesn't mention that. When i spoke to Mike about it before they said:

It was never our intention to create a product that had just one specific regionalism or something that could be labeled as Taiwanese Mandarin. ... New words have come into use, but I haven't noticed the grammatical differences you're describing.

The website just says:

Source Language: English (American)
Target Language: Chinese (Mandarin)

[JustinJJ]

To be honest I think the errors should be 100% ironed out to charge for a product, all tone mistakes and others should be checked before release. I haven't seen updates yet. The most obvious mistake I can across on an audio file was:

 

"我忘记带钥匙了" - "get a plumber" 

[imron]

A terabyte of bandwidth should cost anywhere from $50 to $200 a month. So 2-3 people purchasing the product would cover 1,000 1gb downloads.

Bandwidth should not be a significant business cost unless they are doing something horribly wrong.

 

Edit: To clarify, I'm not saying there aren't other significant business costs, just countering the above point which said that bandwidth was a significant cost.

[sangajtam]

Where do you guys see progress 97%? on what website?

 

edit: ok i see it on bottom with blue bars.

[imron]

Deleted a post. Please refrain from ad hominems folks.