Learn Mandarin Chinese with Paul Noble for Beginners – Complete Course: Mandarin Chinese Made Easy with Your Bestselling Language Coach

Having been a fan of Paul Noble's cd courses since his first French course, I was curious on how he was going to tackle the tricky, tonal Mandarin language, but I was pleasantly surprised. Although I'm only up to CD 5 out of 12, his unique method allowed me to consolidate, review and absorb the 'tricky' structures with his "non-grammatical" approach he takes with teaching his European language courses. However, if your expecting to be fluent in Mandarin Chinese by the end of the course, you will be disappointed, the vocabulary used is very limited. However, Paul Noble concentrates on the basic structures rather than presenting long lists of vocabulary. If you are not put off by the continuous repetition of Paul saying "Say, how do you say I want to order Ma Poor tofu?" or "I'm going to Shanghai." Or "How do you say I want to eat fried noodles?" Then believe me it gets better by CD 3 where you begin to tackle two of the four tones... 1 The "doctor's tone" the pitch you make when saying AAAaaaaaah! and the "person upstairs tone" saying yeH? and whO? By CD 5 things really begin to speed up, but be aware of frequent repetition on stuff you learned on CD's 1 and 2, like "How do you say... I would like?" and "How do you say I want to eat fried rice?" I'm actually beginning to enjoy this and from the number of critical reviews on the "Michel Thomas Method" Mandarin course I think Paul Noble's new course is great! By the way, in January, Paul Noble will be introducing a new second stage Mandarin course.Enjoy!Felix.

I have bought many CD to learn Chinese. This one is really good. I bought a 2nd set to give to a friend who was struggling to learn Chinese.

This course is excellent for giving you the fundamentals of the Chinese language from English to Chinese.However, where it falls down is that it is purely one way learning, in that Paul Noble always asks "How would you say such and such in Chinese". There is never any "Listen to this conversation and translate into English"For me this makes the learning experience difficult because listening to Chinese for instance on the radio the course hasn't given me experience of direct translationSaying that he is a brilliant tutor so I would advise anyone to purchase the book, but I think there are better resources out there .

Not worth the full price. The guys voice is monotonous and he says “now...” what feels like a million times throughout. His methods of swapping out tones 1-4 with “the exasperated teacher tone” and other convoluted names Is ridiculous.I wouldn’t recommend unless you are an absolute beginner and have no other resources at your disposal.