Understanding Spoken Chinese

I'm trying a new book called Making Connections from Cheng & Tsui. The book focuses on understanding spoken Chinese. This is exactly what I need, because I always have the hardest time with understanding a foreign language. The book has 45 lessons and 2 CD's worth of listening exercises. Each chapter starts with some warm-up material to prepare you for the audio lesson. You then listen to the audio once or twice and answer a few questions to see if you got the gist of the conversation. There are then deeper questions for which you can listen to the audio as many times as you like. Finally there are some written exercises to reinforce the subject.

The recordings are designed to sound like real people talking, with run-together words, ums, etc. The real test for me will be if they have people talking while eating. Or if they have a mumbler.

The lessons fall into three groups, Novice-High, Intermediate, and Intermediate/High-Advanced. When I first got the book I listened to the first recording and the last. I could generally understand the first one, but couldn't get the last one at all, so this should be a useful book. Note that while the first level is Novice-High, this book is designed as a supplement to regular instruction. It will teach new vocabulary and usage, but only in conjuction with the material. Also, characters are used, with pinyin only employed for new words, so if you don't know the characters this book won't be very useful. Also, a number of the exercises involve reading real Chinese from maps, posters, and the like. While the course emphasizes listening comprehension, it could also be said to help one learn useful reading comprehension as well.

Note that the book has both Simplified and Traditional versions.

I have finished the first two chapters. The first one included map reading exercises. These wouldn't have been too bad, but the characters are scrunched real small. Having seen real maps that had the same problem, though, I suppose this is preparation.

I'm really looking forward to using this book. I wish I had something like this when I was learning my other languages.