Review: Suceed in Learning Chinese in 30 days

[taijiphoenix]

A big thank you to Elina and Sinolingua Co., Ltd for sending me the Newabc Succeed in Learning Chinese in 30 days for review as per this thread http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/44629-no-more-free-chinese-books-for-now/.  

The book has great colorful illustrations that make it more interesting to look at and read.  It also comes with a cd that contains the images and audio recordings of the words and phrases.  The audio is very clear and easy to understand.

As for the actual book, it is divided into 30 chapters that deal with everyday subjects such as; having lunch, household chores, cooking, habits, etc.  

Each chapter has some goals outlined (in Chinese and English), however each chapter's goals are exactly the same: learn the vocab, learn and use the 12 sentence structures,learn the basic structure of Chinese sentence patterns, and encourage student to talk about (whatever the chapter subject is).  So I think this part is a bit redundant and quite useless to include with each chapter.

The content for each chapter is short but I feel what is included is very useful. The words and sentences include both Chinese characters and pinyin as well as English translation.  There are basically 4 sections to each chapter. First is some general vocal related to the topic, followed by some "useful sentences" using the vocal words.  Then come a section called, Talking to Myself.  This section has very basic sentences like, "I exercise" and "I go to work".  What is a little strange is that these sentences don't include the vocal introduced at the beginning of the chapter, but they still relate to the topic.  The last section is called, Expressing my mood, and builds upon the simple sentences from the Talking to myself portion.  This section takes each of the simple sentences from the Talking to Myself and adds additional sentences to further express the mood or action.  For example, the simple sentence, "I wake up", is followed by, " It's not light yet" and "I really want to sleep some more."

While I like this book, I don't think it would be helpful to someone who is a complete beginner.  I think some knowledge of Chinese would be helpful to apply what is learned from this book.  This book contains no grammar points, just sample sentences.  Unless you plan to just memorize sentences from this book, then you will need additional grammar resources to actually learn to speak.  For example there are a lot of sentences which use the 把 structure, which is still confusing to me after 3years of study.  

Final thought, I like this book only because I have some background in Chinese and can make sense of the structure of the sentences.  The sentences included are really useful for describing everyday things and actions, some of which I never learned how to say in my college courses.  I feel that with this book I can finally start to use Chinese to talk about the things I do everyday and express my thoughts more clearly.

[lechuan]

Thanks for the review. When I was learning Korean, I was getting frustrated with the textbook I was studying, and switched to a book that just taught phrases and had substitution drills. I actually found that more enjoyable and useful at the beginning level, and then could look up grammar points as needed in the textbook. So I can definitely see the value in a book such as this.

I think after all these reviews are over my I'm going to have to get another bookshelf..

[Demonic_Duck]

On a side note, why do authors/publishers of foreign language learning materials continue to insist on naming products "learn [language] in [n≤90] days"? To me, that's a flat out lie. It's false advertising, and it puts me off buying learning materials that (for all I know) could actually be quite good.

 

Publishing legitimate materials under titles like these is equivalent to selling effective and safe weight-loss products under the trade name "one weird old trick".

[studychinese]

On a side note, why do authors/publishers of foreign language learning materials continue to insist on naming products "learn [language] in [n≤90] days"? To me, that's a flat out lie. It's false advertising, and it puts me off buying learning materials that (for all I know) could actually be quite good.

 

 

I 100% agree with this. I don't know how a publisher, in good conscience, can make this kind of assertion. I suppose the problem lies with the buyers of such products because if they didn't buy products making these claims, then publishers wouldn't do it.

[hedwards]

@Demonic, I think it depends what you mean by learn a language. If you mean to just be able to conduct basic business in the target language then a month is probably more than you need. Now, obviously, the quality of the language you're using is going to be poor, but you'd be able to communicate your basic needs.

 

The point there is that it's definitely realistic to get to a point where you're able to learn the rest from locals within that 90 days. And no number of days is sufficient to completely learn a language on every level, even writers like Shakespeare never completely master their language.

 

The main issue is that people have varied notions of what it means to learn a language and often times the standard is unreasonably high. I'm a native English speaker, but I'm not completely fluent in every possible aspect of the language, but I do have the grammatical structures and vocabulary to discuss a huge number of possible topics.

 

@lechuan, those kind of books tend to be the ones that I prefer to use as they actually lead to fluency and an understanding of how the language functions. That's not to say that there aren't other good ways of going about it, but substitution drill books more closely mirror the way that most people use their native language.

[Melanie1989]

 

 

 I don't know how a publisher, in good conscience, can make this kind of assertion. I suppose the problem lies with the buyers of such products because if they didn't buy products making these claims, then publishers wouldn't do it.

((Benny Lewis))

 

 

Thanks for the very honest and informative review, it sounds pretty good!

[Demonic_Duck]

The main issue is that people have varied notions of what it means to learn a language and often times the standard is unreasonably high.

I think the issue here is that sometimes the standard is unreasonably low.

 

An additional problem in this particular case - the book's title mentions "30 days", and it has 30 chapters. So that's 1 chapter to learn a day, which is already pretty ambitious unless the chapters are very short, but you're not just going to learn it, you're going to "succeed in learning" it. To me, that means learning it sufficiently well that you won't unlearn it (学会).

[smcullen]

I'm OK with "learn [language] in xx days" books.   They provide a structured approach to learning and a specific goal.  And they SHOULD spell out how you can expect to be communicating at the end of the XX days. Realistically, will anyone expect fluency in a single book and within 30,60,90 days?      But your points are well taken, this sort of title can be abused as well.

[edelweis]

I borrowed the French version from the library so I can add a few comments.

There are no grammar or cultural explanations, or even pinyin table or basic character stroke order or whatever.

The principle of the book is to give bunches of words and sentences used in daily situations, with a picture for each.
The CD has MP4 videos showing all the pictures while the sound is playing.
Some parts of each chapter have slower audio, while some have faster (to my ear, native speed) audio, which is nice.

The audio is Chinese only (no English or French). This is quite common for Chinese textbooks, but for this type of vocabulary+sentences book, it's rather more of a drawback: if you wanted to practice with the audio only à la FSI/Pimsleur/Glossika (or à la "learn in your car", eh wulfgar), you're out of luck.
On the other hand since the videos show the pictures, you could manage with that I suppose, at least for the simpler sentences. If you want to get MP3s you have to separate the audio track from the video yourself.

You're expected to practice everything and somehow learn Chinese through immersion like children do: the Chinese title is 语感中文. That's why all the sentences are about daily tasks or activities, with a heavy emphasis on 1st person sentences.
There are no substitution exercises (unlike "301 sentences" books) but the book encourages you to do those with a tutor or teacher.
You could also practice the sentences by yourself with a Glossika approach, which is what I intend to do.

Since the character in the pictures is female, the book teaches some gender oriented sentences like "我去美容院化妆。" But male oriented sentences are missing. This is a minor drawback, there are not many sentences of this type.
Also, the book was designed for Americans, for instance there is a reference to 感恩节 (oddly translated as "Action de grâce"). Again this seems a minor issue.

I found the French translations globally adequate but clearly not native.
In some instance a few translations are clearly wrong: for instance the picture shows a bread toasting machine but the translation is about an oven.
This is annoying as it means I can't trust the translations... I might end up checking some words in the dictionary and/or skipping some sentences.

I agree that this book is not for self-studying beginners. But it can be useful if you have the basics already and want to learn more everyday vocabulary and sentences.
For some people, studying the book in two passes might be a good idea (first the shorter and slower words and sentences, then the faster sentences of the last part of each chapter).

Lastly, about the 30 days: this is mentioned mainly on the jacket of the book. Looks like a different person designed that...