I wouldn't think you would sound the same, but more so to get the tones correct (tones are a huge problem for me).

I really want to buy the book, but the website is in Chinese and I'm scared I'll misclick and have to end up paying $100+ dollars for this. Does anyone know how to reach an english version of the page (if it exists), or a way to buy this from an English-speaking store?

If you use chrome or chromium as your browser, there's a translate webpage option that's pretty useful. I was able to get by and buy it without using anything other than pasting sentences into google translate. When you're paying for it, you'll see the amount of money you'll pay before you accept.

I might end up just shadowing these sentences if I can't find anything better to shadow by September. I'm not sure if I'm going to enter the sentences into Anki. I might end up being too lazy. I kind of like just audio since speaking and listening is probably the most important.

After reading this thread, I ran out to 三民書局 and grabbed a copy of 史上最強的英語會話8000. Although the vocabulary is a bit beyond me (looking through, maybe about 25-40% unknown), I think going through this book would be much more interesting than doing RTH and memorising vocabulary like 凹凸 or kicking myself in the butt because I can't remember how to pronounce that word or spell its pinyin.

The only tricky part is dealing with the English part of the mp3's. I prefer the entire lesson to be all in Chinese, but manually editing out all of English snippets in Audacity is going to be painful. I will try to follow bflatnine's instructions and see if I can automate this snipping like he did.

Whenever possible, I prefer to learn language in context.

ADDENDUM: OK, I just went through the steps mentioned by bflatnine - the quality of the output is unblemished, but the process took me longer than I expected. Perhaps as I get the hang of it, it will take less time, but the procedure is definitely a time sink.

Okay, I asked some locals about this book - they actually like it much better than PAVC, but there are some minor problems when the editors translated literally from English to Chinese. For example, How's it going? is translated as 近來可好？ when it really should be 最近怎麼樣？ So we actually have a funky case of where in a Taiwanese publication, the English actually sounds more natural than some of the Chinese literal translations (at least in my cursory scan).

But I definitely don't want to sound negative - if there are other books like this, with Chinese readings, but maybe a level easier than this one, please do let me know. AFAIK, most books like this only include English readings.

bflatnine Wrote:Ze feeling is muchal.

There's also a great book I found the other day for learning Japanese (using Chinese as the base language). It has 10,000 sentences, organized in 5 sections, corresponding to JLPT N5-N1. With an MP3 CD. Definitely getting bought when I finally start Japanese for real. Anyway it's called 新日檢N5~N1必考10000單隨手K.

This is an old post so I'm not sure if I'll get a response, but do you (or anyone else) know whether or not the CD that comes with this also contains Mandarin audio along with the Japanese?

I asked a friend to get this book in Taiwan last month.

I'm just a beginner in mandarin. 2 years studying with a taiwanese teacher.

For just 10 bucks it is a real bargain, even if there are some sentences not quite accurate in mandarin. It also helps practice my reading after my journey into Heisig's book.

謝謝 for this tip!