Chinese in a Flash Volume 4
Product Description
Chinese in a Flash Volume 4 continues to provide more resources for beginning, as well as intermediate learners of Chinese who want to learn the language quickly and easily. This unique set of flashcards enables learners to acquire more Chinese words and their derivatives in an easy-to-use manner, at a pace to be set by the learners themselves. Common idiomatic expressions are widely distributed among the cards; learners who master these will come to appreciate the … More >>
These cards look impressive, but they have one noticeable flaw. On the front side of the cards, they only have the Chinese characters, and not pinyin. This flaw is unfortunately fatal for beginners and even many intermediates. For many novices, pinyin/conversational Chinese comes first, followed by characters over time.
For those who want to focus on conversational Chinese (and have no/limited interest in written character Chinese), I would recommend “Speak in a Week! Flash! Chinese 1001 Cards” as a better alternative. They have BOTH characters and pinyin on the front, and simple definition on the back. Even better, the cards are colored differently for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs (colors have been shown to help with memory).
Note: On Amazon, “Speak in a Week! Chinese” is listed as being available in Feb. 2008, but I just picked them up for myself in Borders (Nov. 2007).
Rating: 1 / 5
These are nice cards, easy to use, great to learn pronunciations. But, if they’re not for learning meanings of words, then leave off of the meager examples. Otherwise, add some more meaningful examples and make them a little bigger.
Rating: 3 / 5
The flashcards are fine, but I would recommend them only as supplementary material once you are acquainted with some of the principles of character formation (there are several fine books for this), like character roots, and the more you know about this, the easier it will be to remember the characters. The booklet that comes with the flashcards is only a very shallow introduction to this. I think that, if I had begun to study characters with these flashcards, I would have been completely overwhelmed. (By the way, if you are an absolute beginner and still have not acquired basic pronunciation skills, I would reccomend not starting to learn characters right away, but instead trying to get some speech proficiency first, using Pimsleur for example)
Rating: 1 / 5
These cards are well made, no problem there, and the design of the cards are great. The problem is that each character is printed separately on its own card, whereas a high percentage of Chinese vocabulary are made of of two characters; for example, “garden” is hua-yuan, but, there’s a character card for hua and another card for yuan. It would be like English cards that had a card for base and another card for ball, but, no card for baseball as one word, or for sweet potato or for study hall. The cards would work well for learning to recognize distinct, separate characters, but not for practical vocabulary practice : you may not mind this, and I wouldn’t have imagined it to be a problem, either, but, for what it’s worth, I no longer use the cards (instead,I have made my own so I have all of those two-character words on one card…).
Rating: 2 / 5
I used these cards all the time and they work if you use them (they don’t work if you don’t use them).
Rating: 5 / 5