Learn Chinese Mandarin!

Great app...

Great audio quality, and keeps your brain active.

Yes, it's really great...

I found this app to be very, very good. I hope this review does help in a decision for others to purchase (or not) this app. This app is quite frankly the best one I have found... so far, and meets it's intended target purpose. To give you a limited vocabulary and phrase list, making this limited words and phrase list "yours" (hearing and speaking up to normal speeds) and leave you wanting to learn more. I read with interest Jaime Shuminski's well written piece a few reviews back (from Nov. of 2011). Jaime's review has glowing things to say about this app, all of which I agree wholeheartedly with. I do disagree however with Jaime's assessment of the differences in the tonal quality (or lack thereof) in the male playback of the pronunciations. If one listens to native speakers (both in country or in language tutorials), female chinese speakers simply DO enunciate more clearly the tonal inflections of Mandarin (which is so very important as Jaime points out). This app addresses proper tonal listening and speaking techniques very cleverly in three ways. The first is when you are going down the word practice list or during the games, then you replay your desired word or phrase, the app alternates between the female and male speaker each replay. You can do it as many times as you want during word practice or even during some games without being penalized (unless it is one of the timed games). I found this to be very useful. Then there is the "slow down" feature (a small turtle icon). It reduces the playback speed of a word or phrase, but does not alter the pitch of the voice so it still sounds natural. This slowdown feature reveals the tones the untrained western ear will probably miss most of the time at native speaker spoken speeds. A nice touch. Then of course the pinyin spelling of all vocabulary is presented with each game or lesson objective, which shows the proper tones of words for you. The speakers in this app are clearly native speakers so I don't think Jaime's negative critique on this one aspect of the otherwise glowing review was telling the whole picture. Clearly Jaime's ear correctly discerned the tonal differences of the spoken word between the genders. Kudos for that observation. Most would not notice. But it is what it is when listening to "real" Chinese. My only complaint? Like all the others, the short list of lesson categories. But that is told up front before purchase. (to Eurotalk's credit, they do point out in it's description of the app that the list is short, focusing on a "less is more" aspect to increase ability in speed of use). So I guess that my real complaint is not with this app AT ALL. It's just that there is no more lessons to buy to add to the already excellent feature set. This is the only "wish list" I have. More "category modules". The price of admission was well worth it and I'll pay more for "encores" to add to the nine categories (275 words and phrases) already there. I appreciate the continued "bug fixes" (of which I have never encountered, it appears very stable) and the little enhancement tweaks still continuing with this app. But I and others would really like to see more lessons than anything else. Eurotalk's uTalk Chinese (Mandarin) has hooked my kids and I enjoy using this with them.