Review by Robert

Admittedly, being a westerner, getting a good grasp of a vowel mad language like Chinese, is very difficult. I have only met one westerner who claimed he was able to learn Chinese MUCH easier than Latin based languages such as Italian or Spanish, et al. Suffice it to say, he’s the exception.n But in the spirit of the recent Olympic games I decided to put my faith in Rosetta Stone, in helping me learn Chinese. It is very slow going. The program does a good job of easing you into the basics of the language. Starting with easy words and relating them to pictures. Note, that unlike a conventional course, you’re not going to be getting any true grammar lessons; you won’t have to sit and memorize how to convert a word from past to present, or male to female, or singular to plural. The beauty of RS, is that you’ll be eased into intrinsically learning it as you go, almost without thinking about it, as you continuously relate words and phrases to pictures.n One other thing I must add, that like French, Chinese is heavy on proper pronunciation. The only way you can learn this language even a little bit is to several (I should say many) times listening to the word/phrases being spoken and repeating them back to the computer, trying to match up your pronunciation with that of your computer teacher/expert. This is not easy for me, but the program lets you go at your own pace, unlike a conventional class, and won’t bug you if you’re too lazy to one day sit down at the computer. But I must underscore that with an Asian language, to a western mind, you must practice everyday because it is extremely simple to forget a word. That is what the audio companion of this package is all about, and for Chinese, is worth spending the extra money for, as opposed to the RS package that doesn’t have the audio companion. Take it along with you, maybe not to pronounce the words back as you hear them (people on the train may think you’re mad :-), but to at least remind yourself of what you learned the day before, and mentally repeat it back to yourself before you continue studying after work/school. That way, you won’t have to bother reviewing and wasting your time, and instead will be ready to move on to the next section.