Michael Birman
Comentado en los Estados Unidos el 2 de mayo de 2025
My interest in learning Mandarin (as well as Japanese) dates back to my days of reading Chinese and Japanese poetry in English translation. If you've read poetry in translation, you usually get the sense that you are missing most of what the poet has to offer, both in meaning and technique. It is frustrating and I've tried to rectify that by learning the language of my favorite non-English poetry.Chinese has been a long-term goal, so I ordered these cards as a way to learn the rudiments of Chinese orthography, one major language difference that must be mastered. I've found these Mandarin flashcards to be quite helpful in slowly building my acumen in recognizing and understanding the symbolic nature of the language. From that starting point these cards carefully build a rudimentary knowledge of vocabulary.That's the strong point of these flash cards. There are also audio guides for Mandarin’s four tones, theoretically helping you to master Chinese pronunciation by scanning the card that contains a QR code. I am not particularly adept at picking up pronunciation through the scrim of internet vocal transmission. I seem to miss the accuracy of the language tones offered by a more immediate example, like a good recording or a fluent teacher. That's the major limitation of these cards. But they are quite good at providing ideogram recognition and at building a rudimentary vocabulary.
W. Kaminsky
Comentado en los Estados Unidos el 2 de abril de 2025
Well made, useful, the word selection is relevant. One can learn pinyin to English (one card side) and correlate to mandarin symbols (backside).
phil
Comentado en los Estados Unidos el 22 de abril de 2025
Very happy with these cards...as they are very good quality, but more importantly have high quality information in a clean way so easy to use. So these will be a good way to start learning to read Chinese, but it will not be super easy I would say, as picking up these symbols from zero knowledge...will take quite a lot of repition imo to get it down. but thats not to say it is very difficult either. These cards make it a lot easier...but it will take a lot or repitition through the cards many times...to start to get the symbols down, and likely more work above and beyond that too. But these are a great way to start.So on one side you get the English word, with the chinese pronunciation (Pinyin), and the other side has the Chinese symbol. So it might be useful to just learn the chinese Pinyin words first, before even working on the symbols so much..as it is a lot to pick up at first. Although people can learn however they feel most comfortable. But going through these definitely has me recognizing the symbols better...and learning a very unique and anicent language...that I have always wanted to know better. So simply with this deck, and no other Chinese intstruction besides 1 or 2 brief youtube videos I perused once or twice...I now am beginning to have an understanding of reading the Chinese language. (slightly...and will take much more work to master.) But these are well done, and an excellent way to start.
Gigi
Comentado en los Estados Unidos el 10 de abril de 2025
The learning value that the flash cards has is very high, someone wanting to learn vocabulary,can learn. These flashcards are for vocab building and have none of the laws about language usage. This is a vocab building deck of Mandarin flashcards, that does have basic phonetic assistance but it's about vocab building and nothing else. That's not to say anything bad,it's just that there are very important aspects of the language that have to be known,before phonetics can be used accurately.For example there is Tones, a huge part of the Chinese language, so knowing the correct phonetics is essential in speaking without insulting someone. These wonderful cards are just for vocabulary building. This is not to say that these flashcards cannot be useful, they are very useful. Some languages are phonetically easier than others, Chinese is not one of those languages that is phonetically easy. None of the dialects are phonetically easy,so vocabulary building using just these flashcards,that will make it a bit harder to speak the language accurately. Unless you have an outside resource like a family member, friend or learning programs.Again,these flashcards are perfect for vocab building. Make sure to keep working on phonetic knowledge outside of these flashcards.The packaging is gorgeous, there's enough words to properly build a vocabulary,as well as construct simple sentences. Everything seem simple enough to follow yet learn the basics or these flashcards won't have much use.
Person
Comentado en los Estados Unidos el 24 de abril de 2025
These cards have some of the standard early Mandarin words that I'm familiar with, but it also diverges into some other short words/phrases that I feel are possibly more advanced or did not appear in what I know to be HSK1.The quality of the cards themselves is great. They're smaller than I imagined, but that is not a problem.