For anyone trying to learn Chinese, there are a plethora of products in the market. But one product—Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook—stands out from the rest due to its uniqueness.
Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook, made by Hong Kong-based Parrot Learning, is a rather interesting approach to learning Chinese. It comes with four books, one basic and three advanced, each with a set of useful and important phrases for day to day conversations in Chinese.
But in addition to the books, Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook comes with one innovative feature: a pen (or stylus) that lets you position over a phrase in the books, and reads out the text loud for you. In English, Chinese, or even Pinyin. The stylus allows you to hear the spoken words with a built-in loudspeaker, or a headsets if you so prefer.
And how useful is it? Very very useful. As someone who has been learning Chinese for eight years now, I can tell you that if I had a product like Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook in my early years, Chinese learning would have been much faster, in addition to being fun.
That’s because in contrast to plain books that promise to teach you Chinese, Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook can actually read it to you. And in contrast to the more multimedia versions of Chinese learning material (which are far more expensive), Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook makes it easy for you to pick and choose, and use both book and audio technologies seamlessly to learn Chinese.
The three books that come with the product are ordered by complexity. Each of them has a set of useful phrases in Chinese, starting from the easiest to more complicated phrases.
The organization of the books lends itself not just to the learner or the casual reader, but specifically to anyone in a situation where they need to know how to say something in Chinese. Just pick up the book, find the phrase, point the pen at it, and hey, presto, the words are spoken by the pen (just in case you are not able to remember it yourself, of course).
In any case, Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook seems like a really useful product to anyone learning Chinese or visiting China or Chinatown areas. Combining the best strengths of book and audio learning, Chinese Talking Travel Guidebook is a perfect companion in any trips that will require you to speak Chinese.
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