First, the book does much more than teach listening comprehension. Depending on what you want to learn, this can be a good or bad thing. Along with real life conversation, they include real-life ads, maps, etc. This would be OK, except that I bought the Simplified Character version and the examples use the Traditional characters. While this may be good for me, I consider it a waste of my time, as I'm not interested in learning traditiional characters, especially not this way. The publisher says a future version of the book will use simplified realia in the Simplified character version, and this will be a major improvement.
Another observation after listening to some of the conversations is that these aren't like the recordings you listen to in the language lab. The speakers throw in hmms and slur words together. The worst one for me was when I couldn't recognize the word ping1pang1, even after hearing it multiple times and having it pointed out by my teacher. She, of course, picked it right out. This is really annoying, but I've heard people speak a lot less clearly in real life so I consider this good training.
Spoiler alert
My last comment is on the storyline. What I'm talking about comes from listening to the recordings, so consider this to be spoilers.
The story is about a couple of students who are married, but not to each other. They are in a foreign country. One is a man and one is a woman. The man's wife is with him, but is always out shopping or doing something else, so these two students hang out. The woman invited the man out for dinner on his birthday and went to see a movie with him and his daughter another time. I don't want to think the worst, but this is the strangest relationship I've seen in a language book.
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