With over a billion people speaking Chinese, the instructional CDs for learning Chinese on the market is relatively small. Professional Interactive Chinese for Windows, a CD-ROM released by VentureTech Inc. is one of the first comprehensive programs of its kind.

Learning Chinese can be a difficult job. One of the most difficult concepts for many English speaking people to understand is that Chinese spoken languages are tonal. Every Mandarin phoneme has four tones: flat (first tone); rising (2nd tone); falling then rising (3rd tone); and falling (4th). For example, the four tones for the sound "ma" will represent four different meanings of words, respectively: mother, hemp, flax, and rebuke .

The Chinese writing system presents another problem for English speakers. Instead of using a small standard set of phonetic symbols like the letters used in most Indo-European languages, the written Chinese language has a unique character or combination of characters to represent every word in the language. While English has 26 letters, a recent Chinese dictionary includes 50,000 DIFFERENT characters. The Chinese characters are more pictorial and stylish than English letters. Most characters are written with ten basic types of strokes. Some characters are composed of smaller parts called radicals. A radical may indicate the meaning of the character. For example some characters include the basic character for water as part of the character. This may indicate that the word or idea expressed has some association with water. Chinese dictionaries list characters by a combination of stroke order and radical.

Professional Interactive Chinese for Windows can assist English speaking people in overcoming these difficulties in learning Chinese . Users can learn Chinese in the comfort of their home without having access to a native instructor. This software is effective in that it will teach users to speak, read, and even write basic Chinese. It is interactive in that it includes a variety of hands-on activities in which users can practice listening, speaking, reading and (character) writing abilities interactively to test what they've learned.

Although it is clear that English speakers are the target audience, the CD-ROM may be beneficial to anyone who wants to learn Chinese, with it's English helpfiles and many options for pinyin romanization (the official romanization method of the People's Republic of China), zhuyin phonic symbols (Taiwanese symbols) or Chinese characters in traditional or simplified style.

A picture of the Great Wall and a piece of Chinese music will bring users to the Main Menu of the software (see above). From there, users can navigate to the three main sections of the program: Teaching, Games, and Management with a click on the appropriate icon, or by selecting the option from a pull-down menu. There is even a small on-line dictionary as a menu choice which allows users to look up the Mandarin Chinese equivalents of English words. Unlike other dictionaries of its kind, this dictionary not only provides users the written meaning of the Mandarin equivalent, but it also allows users to view Pinyin and hear the pronunciation of entries. One drawback of the main menu is that there is no English option for the Management section. Nor is there any suggestion on the icon under the heading of Management to indicate the function or purposes of this particular section.

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE