1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 (123 Magic)

Author : Thomas W. Phelan Edition : 3rd Number of Pages : 224 Publisher : Parentmagic, Inc. List Price : $14.95 Amazon Price : $8.00 Used Price : $7.48

Product Description

Customer reviews

Saved My Sanity! by .. Evelyn Doherty (Hattiesburg, Mississippi United States)
I learned of this book the hard way, a child psychologist recommended it when my the 6-year-old son was in danger of being thrown out of school. I dreaded taking him into stores and I had to sit in the "crying" room of my church, because he would not behave. My son has Aspergers, and some of his behavior had to do with that, mostly it had to do with me.

I read the book, and the principles in it take a little time to absorb. The main premise (and I'm paraphrasing, in my own words): 1) Give a warning. 2) Give a consequence 3) Take action. Idol threats don't work, you have to follow through. I had to take my crying son out of stores a few times, but it started working. I didn't take long before I really started to notice a difference. Today, 6 years later, he is very well behaved.

You have to have a little patience, but this does work. I also recommend Boundaries for Kids.

If your kids act like wild animals, this is the book for you! by .. Boca Doc (Boca Raton, FL)
If you are tired of hearing your kids pitch a fit for no good reason for the umpteenth time and you're at your wits end, this is the book you've been waiting for. Let's face it; kids can be like wild animals. But even lions can be tamed with the right approach. And 1-2-3 Magic provides simple techniques that really work for transforming your 'jungle' back into a peaceful home. As a psychologist who works with parents-and as a parent and grandparent myself-I have used and have recommended the simple and effective techniques described in 1-2-3 Magic many times and have been amazed at how quickly they work. But you sure don't have to be a PH.D. to understand this book. It is short, simple and to the point--and it makes for great bathroom reading! Whether its temper tantrums, sibling rivalry or other common 'challenges' that kids test us with, this book provides short, simple ways to control kids' behavior without losing control of your own! Using this approach: (1)kids become much better behaved; (2)parents remember why they wanted kids in the first place, and (3)parents and kids really begin to enjoy each other again! I also highly recommended the 1-2-3 Magic DVD, which is actually very funny and entertaining and a great way to see this program in action. Good luck!

Dr. Reed

Magic! by .. Heather D. Pyles (Dayton, OH)
This book has been a life saver for me and my family. Since reading this book, I have better control over both my 4 yr old son and 11 yr old son. We don't have arguments or fussing or fighting anymore! I think this book is a must have for ALL parents, even if they don't think they have discipline problems! Enjoy!

It Works! by .. Shannon (Texas)
I received a copy of this book from a friend when I reached my wits with my 3 year old. We were fighting over every single thing, and it was straining my relationship with her to the core.

I must say I don't use the discipline technique exactly, but have found all of the principals and ideas so enlightening. I can see using it more completely when my child is a bit older, and it is nice that I know how to do it. I recommend this book to anyone I can because it has has given me a parenting style that works and improved my relationship with my child 100%.

This advice works and the kids come out better for it. by .. Mars Trader ()
We tried many approaches with our children involving treating them as little adults such as the STEP program and had nothing but trouble. We didn't find this book until our children were approaching teen ages but the advice was still excellent and transformed our relationships. This author, years ago put in writing simple techniques that allow you to set rules, to create a situation where the children learn boundaries even before they fully understand the need for rules, and everyone in the family, large and small, can get through situations without unnecessary stress or embarrassment. Everything you see on TV with the nanny shows is the embodiment of these simple principles.

"Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

Author : David Thomson Edition : 1 Number of Pages : 1024 Release Date : 2008-10-14 Publisher : Knopf List Price : $39.95 Amazon Price : $23.99 Used Price : $23.00

Product Description

In 1975, David Thomson published his Biographical Dictionary of Film, and few film books have enjoyed better press or such steady sales.

Now, thirty-three years later, we have the companion volume, a second book of more than 1,000 pages in one voice—that of our most provocative contemporary film critic and historian.

Juxtaposing the fanciful and the fabulous, the old favorites and the forgotten, this sweeping collection presents the films that Thomson offers in response to the question he gets asked most often—“What should I see?” This new book is a generous history of film and an enticing critical appraisal written with as much humor and passion as historical knowledge. Not content to choose his own top films (though they are here), Thomson has created a list that will surprise and delight you—and send you to your best movie rental service.

But he also probes the question: after one hundred years of film, which ones are the best, and why?

“Have You Seen . . . ?” suggests a true canon of cinema and one that’s almost completely accessible now, thanks to DVDs. This book is a must for anyone who loves the silver screen: the perfect confection to dip into at any point for a taste of controversy, little-known facts, and ideas about what to see. This is a volume you’ll want to return to again and again, like a dear but argumentative friend in the dark at the movies.

Customer reviews

Can you find it? by .. Theodore J. Murphy (houghton, new york USA)
Somewhere in this bible size book for reasons apparent to Thomson and his editors he places "Les 400 Coups" on page 699 After "Quai des Orfevres, page 768" and before "The Queen" page 700. One wonders why he does not put this review in a place where it makes sense...say in the F's or even Les F's...or like some who begin their long books on film with "8 1/2" and "8 Mile" "2001"....etc before the A's.

It means slowly turning pages until you find this review. This kind of idiosyncratic system can be also applied to his ideas of films. Thomson has some good things to say but too often sounds like his first intention is to sound clever- smug- a " I have seen move films than you so I can write like this to cover how board I am when I write like this" sound to it.

I enjoy reading books like this. Ebert's current two volume The Great Movies is far richer and feels much more like person who really loves cinema. Thomson has a manner in writing much like the staging manner or those poor lost souls who design the Oscar award shows...big lavish tributes to a medium they don't much seem moved by.

I recommend his book as one among many like this. But I recommend it with some caveats. Don't expect his points to always be little more than mere assertions- assertions he should try to support. He says of "The Soprano's" ..."in the end Tony is a bore".

well now. David that is really a brilliant insight. Yes. He is a bore. I think that was a big point the series intended to reveal. Gangsters are in the end pretty uninteresting flawed people. Being a Bore in an artistic insight worth making.

Bloody maddening by .. Thomas Plotkin (West Hartford CT, United States)
This series of thumbnail summaries of many many movies is erudite, funny, well-written and infuriating. Like Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane, Thomson is an intrusive critic; we're usually more aware of his own presence than those of the movies he evokes. And his presence is that of the worst sort of Englishman in Southern California, a virus that has infected theSanta Monica region since English directors, actors and technicians (and decades later, music industry folk) began flocking to these shores in the 1900's. They get rich and fat off our pop culture, love the weather, yet feel free to criticize us from their perspective as insider/outsiders who truly have Yanks' measure as no-one else does. Public school class snobbery drips off of these loyal social democrats more than any fox-hunting hyphenate I've ever met; they spend their entire life, when they're not getting drunk, playing hide-the-ball for the fact that they are involved, one way or another, in making mindless entertainment for midwestern american teenages for the benefit of american banks by heaping scorn on the institutions that fatten them.

Thomson is a gruesome offender here -- no matter how much he likes a movie, he's always somehow better than it. Individually, his reviews are terrific, but his flaw-spotting becomes noticable after a while, because it always comes down to the immaturity and infantalism of American audiences that the even the most gifted film-makers are in thrall to, even Kubrick, Altman, the Coppola of The Godfather. He extends this to most global cinema post-1980, seeing folks like Kieslowski as too Hollywoodized; he also hates religion in all its forms, and thus consigns Tarkovski, Bresson, and John Ford to the ash-heap of history, on the implicit grounds that the religious are stupid gullible people.

This from a man who wrote two book-length mash-notes to Warren Beatty and Nicole Kidman, of all people, books all the worse for being highly intellectualized and cerebral. See what I mean about fattening yourself at the trough while biting the hand that feeds?

His book on Orson Welles was the nadir, he clearly loathed the fact that Welles was a popularizer of high culture, and a smiling bad boy who would back down to no-one (unlike Thomson,who writes commisioned works on behalf of Nicole Kidman), and instead of recognizing Chimes at Midnight as being the greatest, smartest Shakespeare cinema adaptation ever, beats up on Welles for his weight and supposed dilletanteism and inability to complete anything, all myths (except the weight part) biographers like Bogdanovich, Leaming, and Rosenbaum have done much to dispel. It comes down to the lamentable notion that if Thomson had been around Welles in 1942, he could have told him a thing or two about better managing his career and putting together his films. What's weird is that this kinda Marxist critic of the US culture industry winds up sounding little different than the executives at RKO who executed Welles' downfall on the grounds that he was too big for his britches and cocky and didn't care what they thought of him.

All of the capsule reviews in this book start to read like this after a while, know-it-all hectoring of the "those who can't do, teach" variety. The self-hating critic's contempt channelled from his job to the works under review. For all his scholarly talk of Sterne and Nabokov tucked away in his movie reviews, he cannot conceal the fact that books like this, and his most famous, similarly thumb-nail entry-organized book The Biographical Dictionary of American Film, are essentially meant to be read while on the toilet.

On the other hand, his novels about the movies Silver Light and Suspects are Borges-like little wonders, fiction about characters from classic movies and their unlikely interactions that actually show a real understanding and empathy for how America's myths often victimize and trap her. Maybe Thomson is just more humble as a fiction writer, aware of his weaknesses out of respect for the form. Both novels, which like 7 people have read, are worth seeking out, more so than his criticism.

Kindle Edition Review: 1 Star by .. Christopher Bord (Utica, NY United States)
IMPORTANT: This review only applies to the Kindle edition of this book.

I've probably helped to sell a dozen Kindles for Amazon. I have mine with me everywhere I go, and I've developed a complete demonstration for when strangers come up to me in a restaurant or on an airplane and wonder "what is that thing..."

This book is the first one I've seen that argues, almost as if the publisher had intended it that way, against the Kindle concept.

1) I point out to everyone I talk with how reasonable Kindle versions of books are - mostly under $10, and many under $5. This one is over $20. Now, that might be justified if there were special navigation features, but...

2) There are no Kindle navigation features to make this book easy to browse. It covers 1000 films, and there's not even a table of contents! (Actually, there is, but the entry for the "1000 films" part of the book is simply "Begin Reading.") Kindle's Search capabilities are almost useless here, because many films are referenced on many pages, making it hard to find the specific page one might be looking for. Flipping through pages on the Kindle to browse the various films in the book was tedious and frustrating. I started making my own bookmarks (am I going to do 1000 of them?) and realized I'd been had. The publisher obviously intends this book to be a "Kindle Killer."

Brief but Penetrating by .. J. Moran (Illinois, USA)
Thomson is the author of the well-known "Biographical Dictionary of Film," and the presentation here is similar. The title says 1,000 films and 1,000 films is what you get, each film the subject of a mini-essay of one page or less (usually somewhat over 500 words). Such limited space makes it hard for a writer to say something worthwhile, let alone original or incisive, on each of his 1,000 subjects. Most of the time Thomson is up to the challenge, although there are some duds. For the most part his writing is supple, his opinions passionate and his views well argued. Even if you disagree with him (and you frequently will), you cannot simply dismiss Thomson's views.

But this is not really a reference book (except of Thomson's opinions). Limited space means too much has to be left out. Plot summaries, for example, are very skinny when given at all. Full, formal cast lists are omitted, major supporting actors usually being merely listed without identifying the character played. There is no index.

Still the book is well worth reading. Thomson has vast knowledge and an acute critical sensibility. He possesses very sensitive detectors for pretentiousness, pomposity and fakery and knows how to skewer them accurately and with wit. He often makes you think again about films that you've seen, sometimes even changing your mind a bit (in my case, for example, about "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"). He can also make you want to see films that you have never heard of or that you had failed to appreciate. An accomplishment at any time but especially with so little space.

I think that the book is best served by being read a few selections at a time. Straight through in large chunks is overload and makes things run together a bit.

Sublime by .. t.g. randini (Highlands, VA)
Essential, fun, and as good as his Biographical Dictionary.... oh, let's just say it clearly now...

Mr. Thomson often says more in one sentence than other renowned critics do in entire reviews, articles, or even books.

There. One sentence.

(Homage to DT with thanks.)

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!

Author : Phil Town Number of Pages : 336 Release Date : 2007-08-28 Publisher : Three Rivers Press List Price : $14.95 Amazon Price : $8.58 Used Price : $7.95

Product Description

Customer reviews

Strange mixture of fundamental investing and technical analysis by .. G. S. Lee (Surrey, England)
I bought this because I wanted to learn how the author married up value concepts and technical analysis. This is possible, but why bother? if you identify value stocks, then why not hold them as Buffet does through thick and thin. The author suggests timing purchases by using MACD (8day and 17 day), Stochastics (14 day) and a 10 day moving average- this -imho-and I have looked at this on quite a number of charts- is ridiculous. you are using short term timers with long term fundamentals. In an up trending market you will be fine, and yes, you will be out in a down trending market, but in a sideways market (possibly 70% of the time) you will be savagely whipsawed, with severe loss of capital, and the fact that you are in value stocks is likely to make not the slightest difference. The book lacks any credible backtesting, and I therefore wouldn't risk my money on this approach. If the author made his money in the last bull run, I suggest he is making the biggest mistake of all - confusing the tide which lifts all boats with his own approach. Its a good read on the fundamentals, but I would steer very clear of this confused approach to investment. I would tend to use a longer timer say 50 day and 150 day to get in and out.

Every Investor, Entrepreneur, and Doer MUST Read This Book: Understand What Great Business Is and How to Profit from It by .. Andrew Chang: 7-Hour School Week and Health, Wealth, Truth (Bay Area)
In today's chaotic times, the only person you can rely on is yourself to create the life and the future you desire. Phil Town follows the fundamental and value analysis that have made Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and Benjamin Graham legendary investors. He breaks down technical details into simple methods anyone can learn and apply.
The basics of Rule #1 investing are:

1. Find a wonderful business
2. Know what it's worth as a business
3. Buy it at 50 percent off
4. Repeat until very rich

Albert Einstein said the power of compound interest was one of the greatest miracle known to man. Through it, anyone can become wealthy. If you begin with a $50,000 account that returns 15% a year, and you constantly save an additional $300 a month to add to that investment fund, you would have over $1,450,000 in just 20 years. This means you can live off the 15% interest of $215,000 a year, without ever touching the principal of $1,450,000 that sits in the bank and continues to grow for you (27).

No nonsense disciplined approach. by .. Rodney Bryant (KS USA)
I watched Phil Town speak at a motivational seminar several years ago. His rags to riches story is what compelled me to start investing. Though I didn't follow his advice at first... I rolled my old 401k over to a self directed IRA.. I made and lost money doing my own thing.

I just recently bought his book and it's changed my view, and my account balance for the better. This book has a "investing for dummies" sense about it. It holds your hand thru the process. It's very straight forward and easy to understand and so far effective.

I honestly believe if you follow these tried and true methods for valuing companies, and if you are disciplined enough to play within the rules, you can and will beat the market. This is not a get rich quick scheme and requires patience, but if you can keep a disciplined approach and do your homework you will eventually be rich. It may not be fast or edgy like day trading, but remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? How many "Hare"(Day Traders) are on the forbes richest people list? Warren Buffet and Phil Town share this same kind of tortoise approach.

So in the words of Phil "Now go play".

Great Foundation to Screen Stocks by .. Marshall T. Wilt (Cumberland, MD)
The best book I have read on investing. I was able to develop a stock screener in MSN Money. If you have an online brokerage account and have access to Reuter's you quickly access 10 year growth rates (as prescribed in his book) without doing any calculation. A formual for picking the soundest investments.

Save your money by .. dealfinder500 (NY)
I don't recommend this book at all. I have read many books on investing recently, and they all agreed on one point - don't invest in a company just because you like the product. Town's advice is the opposite - make a list of things you like, and choose companies that are involved in those things. He also is against Dollar-Cost-Averaging, which every other book I have read tells you of the value of that.

He tells you that he took $1000 and turned that into $1,000,000 in only 5 years. But he doesn't explain how. That raises a red flag for me. He also promises you that you will do better than the best fund managers out there, and promises that you will beat the market. Statistically, only a very small amount of professionals beat the market. It is a absurd to presume that you would be able to out perform all the people who do this for a living (and most of the other books I've read specifically warn against such promises).

He offers calculators on his website to figure out the value of a company. Personally I found them difficult to use (poor design).

There seems to be a lot of overlap between this book and Pat Dorsey's The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing. I would recommend that you read that book instead. Dorsey explains the concepts so much better than Town does, and you can easily import the calculations into excel for ease of use later.

All in all, there's some good advice in the book, but he's put in a lot of lofty assumptions and exaggerations to advertise his book. Even the title is misleading. The title comes from one page in the book where he tells you that once you've done your initial research (hours and hours), then you might be able to get by on spending a quick 15 minutes a week keeping up on your stocks. But the title comes off as in the book is going to teach you how to invest by spending only 15 minutes a week.

The 39 Clues (The Maze of Bones, Book 1)

Author : Rick Riordan Edition : Hardcover Number of Pages : 224 Release Date : 2008-09-09 Publisher : Scholastic Press List Price : $12.99 Amazon Price : $7.76 Used Price : $4.27

Product Description

Customer reviews

The 39 Clues (The Maze of Bones, Book 1 by .. Bobbie S. Feucht (Louisiana USA)
My 11 year old grandaughter loved it. Can't wait for the next book. She loves to read and get on the computer but her computer use is very monitored and this is something that she can do.

Fascinating First Book in an Intriguing Series of Ten . . . You Don't Need Any Game Cards to Have Fun by .. Donald Mitchell (Boston)
I decided to wait until I had read the second book in the series, One False Note, to review The Maze of Bones. I wanted to see how well the books work without the trading cards, Web site, and contest.

Imagine that the Wizard of Oz had been written as a ten part book where you could read what happens to Dorothy and Toto along with clues to help get them home . . . with an opportunity to win a cash prize for solving the clues before anyone else. It would have been a nice publicity stunt, but the pleasure of reading about Dorothy's adventures would have been no less.

The 39 Clues provides a similar opportunity to my imaginary alternative to The Wizard of Oz. The series is a cross between The Amazing Race, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Survivor . . . constructed as a competition for youngsters.

As the book opens, an elderly woman, Grace Cahill, is dying. She instructs her attorney to employ "the alternate will." At her funeral, a handful of the 400 Cahill relatives who attend are invited by ticket to attend a reading of the will. During the reading, each person is given five minutes to choose between taking one million dollars or competing in a contest to solve 39 clues in order to become the heir to the Cahill destiny and become the most powerful people on Earth. They may compete as individuals or as teams. Most people take the money and leave.

Orphans Amy (fourteen) and Dan (eleven) Cahill are pressured by their great Aunt Beatrice (their grandmother Grace's sister) to take the money. She is also their guardian and says she will turn them over to the state to live in foster homes if they don't take the money. The two decide that they want to compete, having a chance to honor their grandmother's faith in them and their parents' memory. Naturally, the siblings form a team, but how will they compete without any money and adults to help them?

Within minutes the competition takes a potentially lethal turn as it becomes obvious that some of the Cahills will stop at nothing to win the competition.

In the rest of the book you'll get to know Amy and Dan better, meet their au pair, Nellie Gomez, and travel to Boston, Philadelphia, and across the Atlantic to Europe. An important American turns out to be important to solving the first clue, and you'll read a lot about that person.

Youngsters will like it that children are the stars of the book (and the contest) with adults playing a supporting role. Parents will be happy that the book contains a lot of interesting historical, biographical, and geographical information in a format that makes learning fun.

The book's main weakness is that it doesn't do much to develop the characters of Amy and Dan before the contest begins. As a result, you'll root for them as underdogs and wish them well . . . but you won't identify with them as closely as if you knew a lot more about them (as Roald Dahl did by introducing the Buckets in detail before launching the golden ticket contest).

The writing is otherwise quite good, and you'll find yourself slipping rather easily into the adventure fantasy (despite many details in the story that don't quite work in real life). I liked the excitement of The Maze of Bones better than the more intellectual focus of One False Note. The two books are rewarding for different reasons.

Don't expect, however, that the writing is the same or that the characters behave in the same way. As with any multiple-author series, there will be shifts from book to book.

To me, the only thing better than a good mystery . . . is a longer good mystery. With the prospect of ten books to keep me entertained, I'm looking forward to reading all ten.

I did look at the game cards and only found two that related to the first story. Those two didn't add much to my understanding of the book. The others seemed to relate to future stories, so they did give me a sense of the future story line. That part was nice.

I haven't tried the online site for playing the games because I'm not interested in the contest, but if that is something you enjoy, please do take a look.

I'm sure the focus will shift more towards the game in 2010 as the book series ends. But until then, you can just have lots of fun with the books!

If you like this story, I also encourage you to ask your relatives about your family's history. You might find that your relatives are connected to some pretty famous events and places. Wouldn't that be fun?

Fabulous book by .. Kristen S ()
I bought this book for my 10 year old son, who loved it. I could tell it was not only entertaining him, but he was using critical thinking when learning about the clues. I am surprised he hasn't shown interest in the trading cards or on-line activities. Maybe that will come as friends read the books and start talking about those activities.

Well worth the money by .. david shannon (nevada)
My daughter is 8 (strong reader) and has been mesmerized by this book. I had to force her to go to bed at night and she woke up 3 times in the night trying to get me to let her continue to read this book. The online site is wonderful. Literally this website (it's free) will keep your kid busy for weeks. It has a place to put the codes from the collector cards you get when you buy this book. There are hundreds of mini missions your child has to discover. Vocabulary would be appropriate for 5th grader and up. If you child is an avid reader (mine is) a 3rd grader could start this book with some help from an adult. It is the best $12.00 I have ever spent on her.

Great book to share with a friend. by .. ()
My friend and I bought this book together and really enjoyed woking together to find all the clues.

Integrated Chinese: Level 1, Simplified Character Edition (Integrated Chinese) (Integrated Chinese) Textbook

Author : Tao-Chung Yao Edition : 2 Exp Blg Number of Pages : 354 Publisher : Cheng & Tsui List Price : $32.95 Amazon Price : $25.00 Used Price : $12.52

Product Description

Now this completely expanded and revised second edition contains updated, contemporary situations, new cultural notes, student-friendly grammar explanations, and an exciting new two-color design that makes learning and teaching even easier!

Customer reviews

Good solid textbook series by .. Birch East (New York)
Integrated Chinese is the good old reliable of chinese text series. Good for studying on your own and good for a class. Its integrated series of support material -- video, audio, workbooks -- is what really separates it from the field.

it STILL hasn't arrived by .. Daniel E. Tinsley (Athens, GA USA)
I ordered the Level 1 simplified textbook and workbook from the same supplier, and the textbook has STILL not arrived after 2-3 weeks. I couldn't find any way to contact the supplier other than this. I NEED the book for an upcoming class quiz. I'm willing to delete this review if I can get it before this weekend.
My address is
101 Stone Mill Run Apt. 21
Athens, GA 30601
Please send it promptly!

Dissapointed by .. Kenneth D. Mohr (hollywood. Fla usa)
Y unfortunely ordered integrated chinese level 1 part 2. This was incorrect so I reordered level 1 part 1 which is what I needed. I immediately returned the first book, however with out sales slip which I had lost. The Kentucky office, where I was told to send it, held it for several weeks until the 30 days had expired. Yesterday I received the book back stating I had not purchased the book from them. I have used no one else besides Amazon,com. I also noticed my order had been taken out of the computer. I now have a book I cannot use nor do I want. Therefore please take my e-mail off your mailing list as I will not be ordering from you again. We start Chinese 1 and 2 june 12. All students will need new books but they will be advised not to buy from your company. I will try to find a place locally or elsewhere.

Best Mandarin learning book by .. Sera Scott (WA)
I started learning Mandarin with the Pimsleur series then moved to learning out of books and this is by far the best choice that I have seen so far. It gives clear explainations of grammar, you learn a lot of new vocabulary in each section and there are good dialoges in the beginning of every section. The vocabulary is up to date that includes words for even popular soda brands like Coke and Sprite. I yet to see a better Mandarin learning course.

very good for an introduction by .. the archer (Portland, Oregon)
I studied Beginning Mandarin at the Northwest China Council offices in Portland, Oregon. This was the textbook used in the class and it was good, not outstanding. What helped a lot was the accompanying CD, to drill on pronunciation. Our instructor was from mainland China. I should also mention the accompanying character workbook which I would unhesitatingly award five stars. The only other text I've encountered is one called Practical Audio-Visual Chinese, which at this point I would grudgingly award two stars because it is difficult to get into. This text is used in a different Mandarin Chinese class in Portland. What alarmed me is that the numeral characters in PA-VC are entirely different than what I learned from IC. I went online to several sources and was relieved to find that all of the numeral characters were what I learned from IC, so it appears to me that the PA-VC is likely reflecting the Taiwanese style of Mandarin. I'm not about to learn another new system of numeral characters so I'll be asking my instructor about this. So far the speech seems to be exactly the same.