Tell Me More Chinese: Amazon.co.uk: Software

System Requirements

Platform: Windows NT / 98 / 95
Media: CD-ROM
Item Quantity: 1

› See more system requirements

Product Features

200 hours of learning
Interactive dialogues
Over 1,000 excercises
Over 800 characters

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links

(What is this?)

Language Learning Online opens new browser window

www.tellmemore.com - Auralog- Software For Language Learning. Auralog

China Suppliers opens new browser window

www.Alibaba.com - Find Trade Opportunities & Products on China Business Directory

chinese more opens new browser window

Just-Eat.co.uk - Your favourite takeaway delivered to your door. Order Food Online Now

Product Description

Manufacturer's Description

Tell Me More Chinese covers all the essential points in learning the language:

- Gaining a command of the main characters - Comprehension - Pronounciation - Written expression - Grammar

State-of-the-art speech recognition: - With speech recognition technology, Tell me More assesses your pronunciation and corrects any mistakes. By using the waveform and pitch curve displays as visual aids, you can improve both pronunciation and intonation. - Tell me More pinpoints and highlights mispronounced words within individual sentences using the exclusive S.E.T.S. (Spoken Error Tracking System).

Oral and written learning: - Over 1,000 exercises - 8,000 word glossary - MPEG videos - 40 grammar rules - Lesson report: evaluation of your work throughout the lesson.

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

6 Reviews

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

Average Customer Review

3.2 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A frustrating learning method for a chinese beginner, 22 Nov 2002

By	D. hickson "Black red" (Carlisle, Cumbria United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My first impression of this language software was that it was very high tech and with the voice recognition system being a great idea to aid the difficult task of pronunciation of the four tones in chinese. In fact the voice recognition did help to correct pronunciation errors, although you could not start on simple single syllable words and progress to more complex words which are very difficult to pronounce. It was very disheartening to be continually told that the system does not understand your speech and therefore did not grade you. This occurred even when the level of the speech recognition was set to a lower level.The rest of the programme contained various tests and exercises. Here the main problem appeared to be that there were no exercises linking english translations to chinese pinyin and even more importantly there was nothing linking chinese pinyin, chinese characters and english together.
There was no stepwise or logical procedure for using the software. You simply dipped into various exercises and were subsequently asked for example to place a missing word in a sentence when you didn't know both what the sentence meant nor the replacement words. The main teaching method seemed to be through making you guess at a multiple choice answer to a question and then correcting you when you got the answer wrong which is a bad method. Most of the exercises were similar to those tests which you would expect to find at the end of a teaching section. The problem is that no teaching sections exist.
The programme did not change to suit your progress. You could be asked to complete the same sentence ten times within 10 minutes after giving a correct answer every time.This was very frustrating and time consuming.
A few software problems exist and the grammar manual has the worst problems. The on screen pages flip over very much faster than you are able to read them and in some instances you are given only around 2 seconds to read a screen filled with text. In the picture word association section you are given a picture of a man and are told that the correct word to be associated with the picture is the chinese word for why.. Very strange. Several seconds of an orchestra playing or of guns shooting to tell you whether you have inserted a correct or incorrect answer was also very annoying and again time consuming.
I think that if I hadn't already studied a litle chinese before using this software I would have given up much quicker. I feel that it may be possible to learn a little chinese using this method but any other more structured approach would be much more efficient and less frustrating to use. For a fast track learner I don't believe this software is of much use.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Misleading and sometimes just plain wrong!, 20 Jul 2004

By A Customer

Whatever your current standard of Chinese, don't buy this.
Chinese is actually not too hard, but it's almost impossible for a native English speaker to learn it from a book, because the characters are (initially) meaningless and pinyin is a ghastly invention(!). A computer should be the ideal solution, because it can use "show and say", associating pictures with sounds and phrases, thereby initially avoiding the need to learn either characters or pinyin. TMM-C tries to do this, but in the worst possible way: it teaches you to associate pictures with the WRONG words. Just one example: in the picture associating "di4" (pinyin) with the English word "earth" (or "soil"), what you see is a man's slightly dirty hands holding a broom handle. If I didn't already know what di4 meant, I'd have learnt it as "broom", or possibly "hands".
It gets worse. Because I do know a few Chinese characters, I did some of TMM's "characters to English" exercises. Among various inaccuracies, the most fundamental was when TMM tried to convince me that the character for "small" actually meant "big"!
Add to these failings the relentlessly idiosyncratic user interface (TMM is not the first piece of French software to suffer from this), the dodgy pronunciation by the featured "native" Chinese speakers (I asked a couple of friends from Beijing and Henan to give their opinion) and the impenetrable and apparently random exercise structure, and TMM is rendered at best useless and at worst actively misleading. I'm so worried how far wrong my Chinese could go if TMM were my only only source of information that I shan't even be giving this one to a charity shop, where it might harm somebody else's chances. Straight into the bin, goodbye money. Sigh.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Talking Mandarin Chinese!, 22 Mar 2002

By A Customer

I advise anybody interested in learning Chinese to try out Tell Me More Chinese. It is very comprehensive thanks to various exercises such as interactive dialogues, crosswords, picture word association, fill in the blanks, word order and the list just carries on!

What I found great about this software is that it uses speech recognition technology so that you can have interactive dialogues with your PC. What's more, the PC corrects you and highlights mispronunced words in a sentence. The speech recognition does work well and is so usefull when it comes to learning Mandarin Chinese. In fact the first lesson is dedicated to Pinyin so that you get to master the four different tones in Mandarin Chinese.

I had seen sevral products before deciding to go for this one. This one is just better than the rest!