[.ca] Berlitz Travel Pack Mandarin Chinese (ISBN 9812462031)

mandarin trvel pk:
Compared to berlitz edition in cassette tape years ago, this CD edition does not have many things to praise: While the whole world use PINYN to help foreigners pronounce Chinese words and phrases, Berlitz keeps on using strange notations, perhaps to facilitate the reading of Cantonese, but not mandarin. The previous cassette edition showed the pronunciation and intonation more Beijing-like. In the previous cassette edition, there were more/longer pause, so the student could repeat the chinese phrase at ease.

Nice:
A nice little book to carry around with you while you are traveling. I do not recommend buying the book by itself. You will need some tapes in order to learn the tones because the book does not mark words with tones which will make a lot of what you try to say not understandable! But it is nice to carry around and point to things if you cannot say them.

Great as an accompaniment:
As a total beginner to Mandarin, this is a wonderful accompaniment to other reference and learning materials. I don't think this does an effective job of teaching the language by itself but the small book with the audio cassette are very thoughtfully put together.