New Product - Similar to Pimsleur and good for pronunciation

[nongmin]

I would like to announce a new website / software for learning to speak Chinese called http://www.instantspeakchinese.com

This product contains over 100 conversation based lessons, 2,500 of the most frequently used vocabulary / phrases and an audio flash card system. The two things that make this product stand out are

1) There is a tremendous emphasis on pronunciation. Once you listen to a sentence, that sentence is displayed in a table where you can hear the words and their tones pronounced individually by rolling over or clicking on the Pinyin. The literal translation is given for each word which helps with grammar. The simplified characters are also given for each word. Each audio file has two different speeds of playback.

2) The conversations and words used are very practical. There was a lot of effort made to make sure the dialogs and phrases were representative of what people talk about in day to day life. This might seem obvious, but if you’ve had experience with Chinese learning material you know that this usually isn’t the case. The course also provides a lot of listening and language review material to help users learn Chinese.

There is an online video demo at www.instantspeakchinese.com/faq.cfm, then click on the "Lessons" demo.

The program also contains two free trial sections which are a talking Mandarin Chinese dictionary and an extensive free section on Pinyin that lets you hear every sound in Chinese through Pinyin. The talking dictionary contains HSK lists and frequently used word information. These two sections can be accessed directly by the web site links:

http://www.freechinesedictionary.com

http://www.pinyin.org

All the content for this course is online so users need to have a high speed connection.

I am the product manager for this product so let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for improving this product.

Jim Thomas

[stephanhodges]

On the demo videos, I noticed that you have a regular and a "slow" version of each phrase/sentence, etc.

However, the slow versions sound like they are computer processed to slow down the speech. Is that correct?

Personally (just my opinion), for the "slow" version, I think it would be better to have people that can speak each individual word, slowly and with a little exageration on the tones.

I don't trust the computer generated version to train listening skills for the slight (to my American ears) differences between "c", "z", and "q", for example.

[nongmin]

The slow version is the voice of the normal speed slowed down 60%. It is just a guide, if you want to hear how each word sounds, I suggest you roll over or click on the pinyin.

[roddy]

Replacing this topic after deleting it for a while - commercial postings need to be checked by admin staff before posting, not after. See here.