Fluenz Mandarin 1+2+3 Windows – Sonia Gil

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LEARNING MANDARIN, A GUIDE EVERY STEP OF THE WAY

Fluenz Mandarin will guide you realistically and step by step through a Mandarin path specifically designed for English-speakers. If there is a language where the Rosetta Stones and Duolingos of the world won’t be of much help, it is Mandarin Chinese; just imagine as an English-speaker trying to learn Mandarin with explanations in Mandarin or without any kind of explanation. Fluenz offers video tutorials in English tied-in to comprehensive workouts where you practice what’s learned every step of the way. This is why the Navy’s Special Warfare Command

FLUENZ MANDARIN

Three reasons Fluenz Mandarin is unique.

1. A Tutor at Every Step

Fluenz Mandarin is the only major program that guides learners with clear video explanations of Mandarin in English tied to a comprehensive workout platform, every step of the way. There is simply no match to Yi Wei’s common sense explanations and strategies on sentence construction, word order, tones and pronunciation, as well as vocab. Those serious about learning Mandarin Chinese, from basic to advanced conversations, won’t find a better option than critically acclaimed Fluenz Mandarin.

2. The Best Option

While subscribing to blogger’s PDFs, listening to podcasts and gathering random resources is certainly helpful, they’re not by themselves realistic options to reach basic or intermediate conversational abilities in Mandarin Chinese. For a language as tough as Mandarin, only a comprehensive approach with significant investment behind it will deliver real results. Our serious approach 1) explains workings of Mandarin Chinese in over 100 videos, 2) offers a realistic path for English-speakers to reach verbal fluency and comprehension of Mandarin Chinese, and 3) connects what is learned with specific, targeted practice designed to help learners reach fluency.

3. Achievable Results

Since 2007 and after several iterations and upgrades, Fluenz Mandarin Chinese remains the premium option to achieve verbal fluency and to lay the foundation for advanced learners of the language. No other major language learning company can boast its founder started the program by going to China to learn Mandarin and understand what it would take to build the ideal program.

YOUR MANDARIN ADVENTURE, ON EVERY DEVICE

Getting fluency in Mandarin is about the right balance between learning and practicing, which is why you can go through the whole program, from every video tutorial to every single workout, on every device. Jump on and off your computer, iPhone, Android phone and iPad while continuing to study your Mandarin. We always know where you left off so that you can find your bookmarket no matter which device you go to.

MANDARIN FLUENZ

Entire Content Guide.

• LEVEL 1
• LEVEL 2
• LEVEL 3

Level 1-2

Master the basics and gain the ability to navigate through a new country or city.

REAL-WORLD SITUATIONS YOU’LL ENGAGE IN:

• Greeting and introducing yourself
• Talking about countries and nationalities
• Going out to eat and for entertainment
• Shopping and monetary transactions
• Navigating airports, subway and train stations
• Communicating with taxi drivers
• Making hotel reservations and other travel arrangements
• Looking for people and places on the street or inside a building
• Telling or asking for your way (directions)
• Telling or asking for the time
• Planning activities

FOUNDATIONAL TOPICS COVERED:

• Writing in Pinyin
• Identifying the tones (sounds + marks)
• Internalizing basic sentence structure (word order)
• Forming basic questions and negations
• Using essential possessives and demonstratives
• Using other adjectives to describe items and places
• Making simple comparisons
• Using essential pronouns and quantifiers (introduction to measure words)
• Counting up to 999,999 and expressing time
• Ordinal numbers
• Crucial verbs and adverbs
• Other crucial specific concepts in Mandarin (zai, ge …)

Mandarin 1+2 has been designed to prepare you for the most important and common situations you’ll face in the Mandarin-speaking world. At the same time, you’ll develop a strong foundation in how the language actually works, allowing you to go beyond simple stock phrases to actually building sentences yourself. This is a serious introduction to the language.

We’ll start with only a few key verbs, nouns and pronouns so that you can really focus on two elements that are quite different in Mandarin : the sounds (the tones) and the structure of phrases (word order and uses). The idea is to make sure you start recognizing words, sounds and patterns while memorizing some basic but powerful sentences that you’re going to need in any context.

You’ll see that shortly the concepts will start to make sense. After only a few sessions, you’ll already be having meaningful interactions in a restaurant, and soon you’ll be shopping, making plans with friends, getting around a city, going out for entertainment, and even making travel arrangements. You’ll also learn how to count and use numbers.

Little by little, we’ll vary the situations and add on some more crucial verbs, nouns and adjectives so that you can express your needs and desires with confidence in most common traveling situations. Further work on locations and times will round out your introduction to the Mandarin language, leaving you well-prepared to dive into your experiences in the Mandarin-speaking world.

Level 3

Solidify your foundation and begin to acquire the tools for more serious engagement.

REAL-WORLD SITUATIONS YOU’LL ENGAGE IN:

• Making plans with friends or colleagues and telling a simple story
• Making more complex orders at restaurants
• Buying specific things at different kinds of stores
• Discussing origins
• Changing money
• Visiting a factory and ordering materials
• Finding your way inside a building
• Looking for an address or a person
• Making more complex travel and work arrangements
• Going to the pharmacy or doctor’s
• Dealing with technology items and tasks
• Talking about the weather
• Talking about jobs and business
• Comparing things at the tailor
• Taking different kinds of transport

FOUNDATIONAL TOPICS COVERED:

• Main essential measure words
• Currencies and Nationalities
• How to form the present progressive (action in progress)
• How to form the future
• How to speak about past events
• Forming more complex statements and questions (new question words)
• Addressing people formally
• Colors
• Using main location prepositions
• Quantities and sizes
• Superlatives
• Uses of “de”

Mandarin 3 has been designed to reinforce the basics studied in levels 1+2, like the tones and the numbers, while getting deeper into some crucial elements in the Mandarin phrase, such as the all-important “measure words”, or new ways of building negations. This level will be a challenge too in the sense that it introduces more vocab and more complex structures in order to prepare you for more intermediate studies.

Indeed, you’ll continue to build upon the structures learned in Mandarin 1+2, so that your journey through this third level leads to more complex and meaningful interactions in restaurants, travel agencies, stores, and with friends. You’ll buy clothing from boutique stores, make personal as well as business reservations and appointments, you’ll enjoy local cuisine at restaurants, go to the doctor, and visit factories and buildings with friends…

From new verbs, prepositions and adjectives to how to express new tenses (past and future), this level is perfect to complete your bases and make sure you have a strong foundation and a deep grasp of how Mandarin works. By the time you finish level 3, you’ll be able to identify and reproduce most crucial words and sounds in Mandarin, allowing you to engage in more serious conversations about essential topics and giving you all the tools to communicate during a trip to China, or even to pursue your Mandarin studies if you wish to.

Indeed, you’ll continue to build upon the structures learned in Mandarin 1+2, so that your journey through this third level leads to more complex and meaningful interactions in restaurants, travel agencies, stores, and with friends. You’ll buy clothing from boutique stores, make personal as well as business reservations and appointments, you’ll enjoy local cuisine at restaurants, go to the doctor, and visit factories and buildings with friends…

From new verbs, prepositions and adjectives to how to express new tenses (past and future), this level is perfect to complete your bases and make sure you have a strong foundation and a deep grasp of how Mandarin works. By the time you finish level 3, you’ll be able to identify and reproduce most crucial words and sounds in Mandarin, allowing you to engage in more serious conversations about essential topics and giving you all the tools to communicate during a trip to China, or even to pursue your Mandarin studies if you wish to.

COMPARING FLUENZ MANDARIN WITH ROSETTA STONE MANDARIN

Journal of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium.

“To use English to teach a foreign tongue? Fluenz says “yes”, and trumps Rosetta stone.”

By Deborah Yap AP Business Writer

DIFFERENCES IN APPROACHES: Rosetta Stone believes in fully immersing the student in the language, without using any English to explain phrases. Fluenz believes adults learn best when they can relate the grammar and syntax of a foreign language to the structure of the tongue they already know.

THE VERDICT: Fluenz’s approach is much better. Hearing English while going through Italian words helps with learning and retention.

On a trip through southern Italy years ago, I was embarrassed to discover that all along, I had been mispronouncing “tabacchi” — tobacco shops that sell bus tickets and other sundry. I’d been saying “ta-ba-chee” rather than “ta-ba-kee” until a storekeeper impatiently corrected me.

Determined not to make the same faux pas, I brushed up on Italian using two language-lesson programs ahead of my visit to Cinque Terre and Tuscany in early July. I found the Fluenz software from a relatively new company by that name better than the venerable Rosetta Stone Totale program.

The two programs had opposite approaches. Rosetta Stone Ltd.’s software believes in fully immersing the student in the language, without using any English to explain phrases. By contrast, Fluenz believes that while full immersion might work with children, adults don’t learn languages as instinctively. Fluenz believes that adults learn best when they can relate the grammar and syntax of a foreign language to the structure of the tongue they already know — in my case, English.

I like Fluenz’s approach much better. I like the comfort of hearing English as I go through Italian words, to help me pronounce them and understand what they mean.

Fluenz helped me make the word associations I needed to learn the language faster. For instance, in learning the word “lui,” which means “he,” the smiling female instructor on the computer screen told me to think of a guy named “Louis.”

The instructor also gave tips on how to pronounce Italian properly. For “Sandra,” which is pronounced “sun-drah,” she told me to open up my mouth for the first syllable.

These were the tips and mental bridges to the Italian language that were missing in Rosetta Stone.

Rosetta Stone’s lessons used all Italian words and sentences, which you match to pictures — of a woman eating or children reading. This approach worked well initially, until it got to more complex sentences and phrases. I’m still not sure what some of them meant.

The look and feel of both programs also differs. Fluenz used the video of a friendly instructor to welcome me to the program and ease me into the lessons. Rosetta Stone went straight to the lessons, which might be fine for some folks, but I felt a bit rushed.

Both programs offer language exercises after each lesson to pin down what you’ve learned.

There were a variety of tests: You match Italian words to the pictures or type in the words yourself, among others. You weren’t graded but the programs tell you if you’ve made an error.

Rosetta Stone also offers the option of talking to a native speaker for no additional cost. There are group sessions you can join throughout the month. You pick an online meeting time that’s convenient for you.

But both programs fall short in failing to introduce conjugation and grammatical rules, so that I could construct my own sentences. Perhaps it’s just my preference, but as a speaker of Tagalog, Taiwanese and English, I’m not satisfied with simply memorizing sentences as I’ve had to with Rosetta Stone and Fluenz.

It boils down to why I take these lessons. For a casual tourist or business executive, memorizing a smattering of phrases is probably good enough. For more serious linguists, there’s no substitute for a formal Italian lesson. I fall somewhere in between.

Rosetta Stone Totale costs S999 for a year. Lessons can be accessed online through RosettaStone.com, and the price includes audio CDs and a headset to practice five levels of Italian on the go. There is no software to download. Rosetta Stone also makes cheaper sets available, without the language coach and a few other perks such as an online community of learners. The one with all five levels costs S699. In this case, the software comes on CDs that you can buy online or in mall kiosks.

Fluenz offers two levels of Italian for $357 combined. The program comes on DVDs and works on Windows XP, Vista or 7 and on Mac OS X 10.3 or higher. Besides the DVDs, you get an audio CD to review what you’ve learned.

Fluenz also has software for French, Spanish and Mandarin, while Rosetta Stone offers 30 other languages, including Swahili and Turkish.

In the end, I had more fun learning Italian using Fluenz. The software’s female instructor introduced each lesson and sought to evoke the excitement of Italy by sharing imagery such as sitting in an Italian class in Milan near the Duomo, or cathedral. Such mental motivation goes a long way toward keeping me interested in the lessons.

She also encouraged users to keep learning by telling us we can do it: “Italian is your friend,” she said. “I hope you go to Italy soon.”